HP Pavilion dv5242 'No drives found'

I'm installing Red Hat AS on my HP dv5242 but right after disc checking, it says "No hard drives have been found" and asks me to choose drivers for the installation to succeed. I tried all the pre-defined drivers but I still got the same problem when it prompts me to do Automatic or Manual Partition, "No drives found - invalid devices were found on which to create new filesystems".

My hard disk model is HTS541010G9SA00, it's a product of Hitachi and their site says the driver is included in the OS. Win XP home is the OS bundled with my notebook. Is the disk driver also bundled in Red Hat AS?

I partitioned my hard disk using Partition Magic and tried different filesystems (FAT32, NTFS, ext2, ext3, and even make it unallocated) then install Red Hat AS again but I still got the same problem.

I've installed Red Hat AS on HP desktop PC's before and I have no problem at all. I have not tried to install other Linux flavors but I really prefer Red Hat AS. Haven't tried Fedora yet but it's an option if I it don't have a problem with the disk.

Is something wrong with my partitioning or do I need any other driver? Any help/response is appreciated.

Thanks!

 

Do you have boot magic loaded to give you an option of XP or Red Hat ....

 

I don't have boot magic.

I'm on the initial stage of installing Red Hat AS and it says no hard drive found. I have an existing Win XP Home installed and I want to dual boot with Linux.

What seems to be the problem in my hard drive? Is it the partitioning or Red Hat AS cannot really detect my hard drive?

 

Hmm... that's a thinker. I'm assuming your drive is an SATA... this could be the problem. Most OS' don't like working with serial drives right now, they're still stuck in IDE thinking. This includes Windows. Usually Linux distros are a little ahead of the curve though since there's a large community on it. You might try to check out the Red hat forums or google "HP dv5242 Red Hat" and see what comes up. Also check www.tuxmobile.com.

EDIT: I just checked both of those and came up with nothing. Like I said, try the Red Hat forums. You could also d/l and try a LiveCD such as Ubuntu and see if that will read it. Might give you some idea about something.

 

This is something to share...

I have this experience installing Red Hat 8 to an HP desktop (I forgot the model) and it's hard drive is a SATA. While anaconda is preparing to install Linux (detecting hardwares, devices, etc.), it says the hard drive cannot be detected. I search on the net and I found out that RH 8 does not support SATA drives, but Red Hat AS can detect SATA drives. Our client bought RH AS and I installed it successfully, no problem at all.

With this experience, I know that I won't have any problem with the drive, be it SATA or IDE. But this problem I'm facing now is getting a bit irritating. I think I have to try other Linux flavors and see what happens.

 

If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say the default kernel on RHAS is to blame. SATA support is still maturing, and there are several SATA chipsets (including mobile) that are only supported by very recent kernels. Red Hat's Enterprise distros are geared towards stability and usually run with an older, and thus better tested, kernel.

I remember reading about a similar problem with the last round of Ubuntu dev releases... wasn't fixed until they upgraded the default kernel shortly before 6.06 was released.

 

Hello

I am New here

i am not sure about dv5242, but try to disable SATA native mode from Bios

Install you OS and download SATA AHCI driver for your OS .after installing driver , reboot and set back SATA native mode to enable

Let me know it works or not

 

Hey Jaisal, welcome to the boards. Next time you respond to a thread, make sure to check the date on the posts, as this one is about 10 months old! Unfortunately, this problem has probably been either solved, or abandoned a long time ago. It's highly unlikely that the poster is still checking these boards for the solution.