Hard drive goes missing after install

[Peter Waller]

I recently purchased an unbranded laptop, mostly based on the intel chipset.

I am using Ubuntu 6.06 from the DVD iso that's on the site.

It boots fine from the livecd (barring a long wait of several minutes at "Mounting root filesystems..."). The installation seemed to work flawlessly, partitioned the hard-drives and everything, copying the files to disk.

Come to restart the machine without the livecd in, and the wait at 'Mounting root filesystems' is now a good 5-10 minutes. EventIually when it gives up, I get messages such as

"Alert! /dev/sda1 does not exist! Dropping to shell"

This shell seemed rather cryptic and I couldn't see anything useful I could do with it.

So, booting back into the livecd, I looked at gparted, my partitions were there, however there was a warning next to /dev/sda1, saying it could not be read. Also, `ls /dev/sd*` only listed /dev/sda (the 'useful' partitions are /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda5 (swap)). If I delete and reformat /dev/sda1, it becomes usable within the livecd, I can happily read to and write from it. That is until I reboot. So something seems to be going awry at boot time.

An output from lspci -v can be found at http://misc.randomphp.net/lspcidat and from dmesg at http://misc.randomphp.net/dmesgdat (though be warned this will probably be transient so if anything is required for future logs it would be best to copy it somewhere in this conversation)

dmesg contains some interesting things relating to hard drives and not being able to detect things, which seem a bit weird.

I have spent the best part of a day attempting to fix this problem to no avail, with linux experts at hand. They've told me something is seriously wrong, and that I should file a bug report, so here I am.

I actually wrote this bug report from the livecd. Everything seems to be working fine, but I just can't use the hard drive. What's up with that?!

Thanks in advance,

Peter.

[Peter Waller (peter.waller)]

The title of this should probably read 'hard drive goes missing after reboot'.

On some advice I got from linuxquestions.org, I tried the Knoppix livecd. It successfully found and mounted the partitions that were made within Ubuntu. Some test files I created on it from within ubuntu were accessable and everything.

Ubuntu still can't see /dev/sda1 after a reboot. It seems to be some but with detecting the partitions table.

- Peter