On 14/04/11 17:37, Mark Rogers wrote:
I decided to install Linux Mint on my trusty "old" Fujitsu Siemens V5535 laptop (it's about 2 yrs old). I bought a new 2.5" 250GB SATA drive to replace the old 80GB (Windows) drive, and set off on the install.
However, I got all sorts of disk errors, so (assuming the disk to be faulty) I got another (different brand) 250GB SATA drive and started again - same results. I'm also seeing issues at the POST stage (eg sometimes the BIOS doesn't report a disk being present, sometimes there's no drive to boot from, etc).
Assuming you have eliminated the obvious problems with poor drive connections and the machine is stable with the original drive then I am not sure what the problem would be. Does the machine have a "dongle" between the SATA connector and the drivebay ? If so check this is seating well at both ends and if available wash it out in a bit of isopop/switch cleaner (not WD-40)
There was the whole SATA vs SATA2 thing but your machine is too new to be suffering from that I would have thought and also too new to suffer any of the BIOS limitations on larger drives. Even then these would I suspect result in a permanent problem rather than an intermittent one.
It does really look like an intermittent hardware issue or something where the disc isn't spinning up quick enough at power on/out of disc suspend.
Is there any pattern to the POST issue, does it only ever happen from a cold boot rather than a reboot etc ?
If you still think it is a drive capacity issue try something < 137GB to avoid the requirement of 48 bit LBA but as far as I can remember those wouldn't prevent the BIOS from detecting the presence of a drive during POST and I can't remember ever seeing a SATA chipset that wasn't capable of 48bit LBA