Ubuntu rejects Soni's old Machine
Written by on in Tuxedo.

Have a rather nice older machine here, P4 with a reasonable video card and memory. Should be a kick-arse Linux machine for our niece and nephew. Except that Ubuntu can't seem to see the disks. It's nothing special, Asus P4P800 SE motherboard with an Intel IDE controller. Should be dirt-simple, but the disk is just are not showing up as a device with any BIOS settings I try.

Guess I'll have to give into the dark side and re-install the (corrupted, infected, ridiculously slow) XP it came with.

Comments

  1. palmTree

    palmTree on 06/24/2008 1:26 a.m. #

    A Solution From here:
    http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/ubuntu-63/ubuntu-does-not-install-on-asus-p4p800-se-493299/

    Ubuntu does not install on ASUS P4P800 SE (problem solved)

    I have tried unsuccessfully to install Ubuntu for the first time on a brand-new ASUS P4P800 SE mobo with BIOS version 1010.007. It would not even mount the root file system, and I kept getting "The drive appears confused" error messages.

    Luckily, I could solve the problem. This post is for all those out there who are running into the same problem with this mobo:

    The ASUS P4P800 SE BIOS version 1010.007 appears to be incompatible with any debian 2.6 kernel, including Ubuntu, even though it runs fine with XP and even with the 2.4 debian kernel. Once I got the 1011.001 BIOS version off the ASUS web page and installed it as described in the ASUS manual, Ubuntu installed without any problem.

    With that BIOS version, I'm running (K)Ubuntu now for almost two weeks without any problem, and I'm becoming a true Ubuntu fan.

  2. Thomas Doggette

    Thomas Doggette on 06/24/2008 3:04 a.m. #

    For God's sake, man, Ubuntu's not the only game in town! Try Suse, try Fedora, try DOS, ANYTHING before... that.

  3. Maxo

    Maxo on 06/24/2008 12:11 p.m. #

    Ditto on above.

  4. Mike Fletcher

    Mike Fletcher on 06/25/2008 6:43 a.m. #

    Thanks, will try flashing the bios on the board.

  5. Mike Fletcher

    Mike Fletcher on 06/25/2008 6:50 a.m. #

    I don't much like Ubuntu for myself (I use Gentoo), I want more control. That said, I'm quite happy with it as a tool for people who just want a generic word-processing, web-browsing, game-playing, music-playing machine that just works.

    Fedora didn't impress me all that much during my work on the OLPC (package management seemed crude (and I have to admit to having been burned by RPM dependency nightmares way back in RedHat 7 which have strongly prejudiced me against the format)).

    Haven't tried Suse, but wouldn't be comfortable installing a distribution I don't know on the machine.

    DOS is great... I suppose.

  6. Mike Fletcher

    Mike Fletcher on 06/25/2008 10:08 p.m. #

    No joy in Ubuntu-ville. Flashed the bios and still no drives showing up in Linux.

  7. Clint Sheridan

    Clint Sheridan on 06/26/2008 2:37 p.m. #

    Try Gutsy or earlier, or better still, try Edubuntu if you're just looking for a quick and easy Linux for the niece and nephew.

    Hardy Heron, with it's default install is a real pain with older drive controllers as the dev's seem to be under the assumption that everyone uses SATA these days and use a wrapper to get IDE working.

  8. Mike Fletcher

    Mike Fletcher on 06/26/2008 9:40 p.m. #

    Have tried with Gutsy, no joy there. Edubuntu might be okay, but at this point I'm caving and just installing Win2k. I can't spend days and days on this (oops too late).

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