Ubuntu Install Problem Might be Hardware Related

Question

This is my first experience with Ubuntu. First of all, let me say that i am installing Ubuntu on a machine whose hard drive crashed and I have replace the C drive with a new drive and I think my problem might because of the pin settings on the back of the hard drive and the fact that my system might not recognize it as the C drive.

What happens is this. After I have installed Ubuntu, the Ubuntu system says that the installation is complete and that I need to restart the computer in order to use the new installation. After I click the button to "Restart Now" the CD drive spits out the installation CD and the computer hangs.

After waiting several hours just to be sure, I manually power down and power up the computer.

A dos-like display goes by the screen (as it always had) showing what hardware I have on the system . Here is where I see the first thing that is wrong. It says:

• Pri.Master Disk: 0 MB Mode 0

If I bring up the BIOS settigs it says that the Primary Master is [AUTO]

if I let the power up of my computer continue it says that there is a disk boot faulure.

What do you suggest I do?

Answer 1

I would suggest you go to http://serverfault.com/ instead but that would be mean =)

I would do a few things, first, look at the model of the HDD you have and google for a pin diagram or manual, if you only have one HDD it should be simple enough - set the pin to master and make sure it's in the master slot of the cable if the cable has two slots. Also IIRC you may have to plug the cable into the right slot on the motherboard, labled primary IDE (the other one being secondary) or IDE0 (the other one being IDE1) or IDE1 (the other one being IDE2) then reboot and try to get the BIOS to tell you what kind of drives it sees. That should not be 0MB. If you didn't understand a lot of what I said, try reading through this:

http://freepctech.com/pc/001/installing_ide_devices.shtml

(I was feeling lucky on "master slave IDE" and it came up, seems thorough enough for your purposes)

After you're sure you're pinned and wired correctly and it still doesn't see your drives edit your post =)