Problem with Grub and SATA at installation

[Art Inion]

On Sat, 13 Nov 2004 20:55:05 +0100, Bruno Dusausoy wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I have a friend who tried to install Ubuntu.
> 
> He has an ASUS P4P800 Motherboard with an Maxtor SATA drive. It's his only
> drive in his computer.
> 
> He first partitioned his hard drive from Windows 2000 with Partion Magic.
> He left 60Gbytes for Linux.
> 
> He then booted from the Warty install CD. Everything went well, his hard
> drive was well detected.
> 
> The installation program did find a Windows installation, and asked if my
> friend would like Grub to handle it automatically. He chose 'yes'. When
> Grub tries to install itself on the hard disk, the process freezes at
> exactly 50%, then nothing, absolutely nothing.
> 
> My friend retried (= rebooted and relaunched the install process) a few
> times without any success, it's always stuck at 50% of the grub
> installation.
> 
> It seems the SATA drive is detected like a SCSI one; I don't know if this
> is relevant 'cause i don't know nothing about SATA.
> 
> I cannot give more information now because I'm not in front of his
> computer, and he's a novice.
> 
> Maybe I can go at his home asap and send more informations about this
> problem, but meanwhile, can somebody tell me if he has some ideas about
> this ?

There were issues that we encountered about linux kernel versions and SATA
support. I encountered that when a client was trying to install linux on
an SATA hard disk drive.

Check kernel version. Check brand of SATA controller and chipset. From
past experience, the impression was that SATA chipsets vary among
manufacturers, say Adaptec and LSI. One of the two is currently supported
by the latest stable linux kernel version (fingers crossed).

Art