[SOLVED]Hard Disk not recognized when installing

Question

Hey all, I'm just starting with Arch and I've had some trouble installing it on my Acer netbook.
My first installation went well except that I had forgot to download the wireless tools so I decided to do a fresh install as I had no access to a wired connection at the time.  The second installation attempt must have had some error on my part as Arch failed to start after selecting it from Grub, saying that the kernel was not available/not recognized.
Now my subsequent attempts at installing have failed because the hard disk is not recognized when running either cgdisk or cfdisk.  Instead of showing my hard drive partitions after running
cfdisk /dev/sda
it shows my usb drive. If I instead use
cgdisk /dev/sda
it displays an error saying that the disk is damaged or not recognized.  When I first saw this I thought my disk was failing, so I tried #! to see if it would show the same error, but it was able to recognize the entire disk and install correctly.  Now, even after having the entire disk formatted as ext4 with #! installed, cgdisk is still giving me the same error about a damaged disk.
Am I doing something incorrectly or is there a fix for this?  I haven't been able to find any information about this after a good while of searching.
Thanks for your help.
Last edited by Forest_Leaves (2013-03-05 08:30:24)

Answer 1

srs5694 wrote:The cgdisk "damaged disk" error is probably a result of the tool seeing an MBR partition table on your USB flash drive, rather than the GPT disk it's expecting. If I'm right, you should not follow s1ln7m4s7r's advice, since that will simply trash your USB flash drive!
If you mean by trashing the USB flash drive, that it will delete all data and partitions on the selected drive it is correct, because:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/$disk bs=4096 count=1
- this will delete all partition-table data
sgdisk -o /dev/$disk
- this will clear out all data. This includes GPT header data, all partition definitions, and the protective MBR.
/dev/$disk
- this will make you enter ncurses-based GUID partition table (GPT) manipulator, where you can create new partitions
You should only do this if you are certain of what disk it is.
Now if when you said this, you were meaning it will became broken, then it may be a special kind of usb drive because i've donne it many times and i've not broken any.
srs5694 wrote:My guess is that either your hard disk has become /dev/sdb (this can happen in some cases; disk identifiers aren't really fixed) or you're missing a driver for your hard disk controller because you've booted a different kernel or a different initrd file. Another possibility is that there's a hardware fault -- probably a loose cable -- that's preventing the kernel from seeing the disk.
If the usb drive is not where you installed arch, then you need to find if there are more recognized drives:
lsblk | grep disk
And see the uuid of the root partition you want, and add it to your bootloader boot line:
blkid /dev/sdxx
Last edited by s1ln7m4s7r (2013-03-04 19:17:36)