Murphy Bytes

I just picked up a super beefy HP desktop machine that I wanted to use for a development box at home. Of course the first thing that I did when I got it home was to attempt to blow away the pre-installed Windows 7 OS and replace it with Ubuntu 11.10. When I tried to install Ubuntu, the installer wouldn’t detect my SATA drive. It turns out that the drive had raid configuration information that was telling the installer to skip the drive. This is what I did to get around the problem.

1. I created a live USB with 1 GB of writable space and booted to that.
2. Open a terminal and become root sudo su
3. Type fdisk -l to find your SATA device. ( Mine was /dev/sda )
4. Type dmraid -E -r /dev/sda ( Substitute your device for /dev/sda if required )
5. Confirm that you want to proceed.
6. Run the Ubuntu installer.  It should recognize the volume now.