[CentOS] CentOS 6.4 installation fails with message "No usable disks have been found"

[John R Pierce]

On 4/6/2014 6:25 AM, Meikel wrote:
> Just to be sure that there are disks available and hardware works I
> installed a current Debian which works fine. From the BIOS and from
> Debian shell command "dmesg | grep -i ata" I see that there are two
> "Maxtor 6Y120L0" installed. Find output of "dmsg" below that email.
>
> Is it possible and what steps are necessary to install CentOS 6.4 on
> that "Maxtor 6Y120L0" hard disks?

thats a parallel ATA aka IDE drive?   do you happen to know what sort of 
IDE controller it is plugged into?   is the IDE properly configured, so 
the two drives (you *do* have two drives, right?) are the master on the 
end connector of a 80 wire cable (I note dmesg says UDMA133), and the 
slave is in the middle connector?    IIRC, parallel IDE drives on 
UDMA100+ should be jumpered for 'cable select' and must use a cable that 
has a black, grey, and blue connector, where the black connector goes 
into the motherboard, the grey connector is for the slave drive, and the 
blue connector is for the master drive.

you might try booting the CentOS DVD into single user mode (linux single 
at the boot prompt), and at the shell, `dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda 
bs=65536 count=65536', this should zero the first 4GB of the disk, it 
will take a minute or something.   repeat with /dev/sdb for good luck.

frankly, any time spent on this is worth more than these drives. PATA is 
a closed chapter of computer history.  SATA took over starting 10 years ago.



-- 
john r pierce                                      37N 122W
somewhere on the middle of the left coast