So it seems I have a stumper.

Riddle me this:

XFX NForce 750a SLI Socket AM2+ motherboard
Two PNY GeForce 9500GT 512MB RAM video cards
Two OCZ 2GB PC6400 DDR2 800MHz RAM sticks (4GB RAM total)
AMD Phenom 9500 quad core CPU
A couple of SATA hard drives

I've just now tried to install both Fedora 11 and Ubuntu 9.04 by trying to create a linux partition in the empty space on my hard drive, and neither distro is able to locate any of my drives, partitions, or empty space. When I get to any sort of disk partitioning step in either install process, I get either a totally blank drive and partition field (in the case of Ubuntu) or just a dealbreaker error in Fedora.

Windows 7 64-bit RC resides on the same physical drive, and runs just fine.

I've attempted to install the 64-bit versions of each linux distro I mentioned. I got as far as the live desktop from Ubuntu, but it still wouldn't let me install, because even there it couldn't find either of my physical drives, much less their partitions.

Oh, yeah- the Fedora installer forced me into text mode. Go figure. But please- I've tried the latest from two distros I like, and neither of them can even see my existing drives. This is off a clean format and reinstall of Windows 7 Ultimate RC 64-bit, which installed and runs perfectly. I have unused space on the same physical disk, and wish to devote it to linux... but I can't, for some reason.

I can't install any distro anymore, it seems. Help, please. This is a new and most unwelcome bug. :)

Do you know how to add kernel boot options at the installer window? I believe you can pull it up on the Ubuntu installer by hitting F6 before you start the install. If that's not specific enough, let me know, and I'll look it up. (All the installers seem to have different ways of doing this, and I can't remember them off the top of my head.)

Anyway, when you pull that up, delete whatever might be there and add 'pci=nomsi' (without quotes) to the line. Now start the install.

This should allow the partitioner to see your SATA drives, and you can proceed normally.

If it doesn't and if you can get to a boot prompt (text mode), post the output of this command:

fdisk -l

... and we'll go from there.

I'm installing Ubuntu now. For some reason, Fedora wouldn't let me use the graphical installer, and when I got to the disk partitioner, there was no indication of any advanced options that would let me specify my partitions manually (which I always do when I dual boot). I was afraid Fedora would decide to hose Windows 7 for me, and I definitely didn't want that after going to the trouble of reinstalling it and all.

Dropping a nuke your hard drive is always fun, isn't it?

Messing with the discs is my least favorite, most anxiety inducing moment of any OS install. There's so many bizarre things that can happen.

I'm glad that worked for you. You may or may not have to add that bit to grub's /boot/grub/menu.lst

For some people it's enough to be able to do the install. For others, they have to have that option pass on each boot. You'll know when you try to boot whether you'll need it.

FWIW, it's an issue specific to the controller chipset on that motherboard or any mobo that uses it. I don't know the specifics just that some power-saving features of the kernel do not work and play well with the SATA driver. It's a filed bug for the kernel, so hopefully it'll be fixed eventually.

Now the system hangs when it says "Starting up..." for about half a minute, gets to the slash screen, and then it dumps me to a shell, complaining that my "BIOS doesn't handle ACPI _PSS calls in a way that linux understands" (odd, because the Ubuntu live CD runs just fine, say thankya). It even tells me to complain to my vendor. How nice; I'm sure they'll listen.

Should I try to flash my BIOS? I'm as nervous about that as I am about messing with my partitions when they're labeled by model number instead of volume label.

I tried adding noacpi to the kernel options at boot time, but that doesn't seem to have an effect. I'm even having issues with the linux boot menu- when I try to edit the boot options, I'm able to add options to it just fine, but pressing 'b' to boot reboots the machine instead! Also, the changes I've made don't seem to persist when I hit 'esc' to go back to the main boot menu. These two issues together seem to make being able to edit the options passed to the kernel at boot time totally useless. What am I doing wrong?

The live CD boots to the desktop without complaining about my BIOS. WTF?

... not for this.

The LiveCD boots because it isn't having to deal with your SATA controller, which is the problem, or at least one of them.

I tend to edit the grub loader manually, so bear with me here. I think this will do what you're trying to do.

Go into the GRUB editor (this being where you were when you were trying to edit boot options), then select the correct kernel, the first one probably, and hit the 'E' key to edit it. Select the "kernel" and hit 'E' then add 'pci=nomsi nolapic noapic' (no quotes) and hit ENTER. This should take you back to the prior screen, after which you hit 'B' to boot.

OnEdit: AHA! I found actual instructions. I had read this before and was trying to do it from memory. I'm amazed I remembered this much.



I don't *think* the nolapic and noapic options are actually a necessity, but it won't hurt, so you may as well add them just in case.

I'm typing this from Ubuntu.

THANK you for your help; I didn't know what the things the machine was complaining about did or were for and so didn't know where to look on Google beyong putting the phrase the OS gave me into quotes and searching forums. YUCK.

It seems to be running swimmingly now. Should I worry about the fact that the machine said it was emulating what it was complaining about in my BIOS?

edited to add: What exactly was its complaint and why? Is this some sort of near-legacy function or something?

I've known dozens of people with similar problems. Until work was done on the kernel to deal with this, many, many people had problems with their USB interfaces. You could get them working via software emulation *after* an install, but the system would halt when trying to install unless you turned off USB detection and configuration.

I'm not very good at explaining issues the kernel has dealing with hardware. I understand it conceptually, but that doesn't translate well into words for me.

But, basically, what's happening is that the kernel has some features that do not function properly with the specific chipset used for your SATA controller. These are, if I understand the problem correctly myself, power saving features put into the kernel specifically for laptops. (It's described in technical terms in a kernel bug report, but I find kernel bug reports impossible to navigate to try to find them.) These functions aren't strictly necessary, but they become important when power use is a major concern, as it is with laptops. Linux, for all its qualities, has a very poor record with battery life in laptops, in part due to the way it handles discs. The kernel feature in question here attempts to address that, but the chipset your board uses goes wonky when those instructions are thrown at it.

Regarding finding information about the problem, as mentioned, I'd already stumbled across this kind of issue before, and I recognized it as probably a SATA controller problem. (There was a time in the not too distant past when you had to install SATA driver separately just to get them to work at all.) I knew about the pci=nomsi solution, which I mentioned this morning. I thought there would probably be more to it, but wasn't sure right then.

I hadn't bookmarked that particular page I linked above, though, so to find it again I used the following search terms in Google:

linux XFX NForce 750a SATA not detected

Several pages on the first page of search results described potential solutions, but I tend to go with Ubuntu forums for these things when Ubuntu is involved.

Generally speaking, adding the word "linux" at the beginning of the search box, the brand name and model of the hardware involved if you know it, and some brief description of the problem itself tends to turn up decent results.

When experiencing a problem like this, if all else fails, I go either to the distro's forum or linuxquestions.org and either look for discussions and/or post a question myself.

Anyway ... glad it's working and happy computing!