bios can't see hard disk

[jaddle]

I got a brand new X60s. First thing I do is install linux onto it - it's a little tricky, since have no floppy or cdrom, and debian's stable installer doesn't seem to work too well with the X60s' hardware, but I get an updated kernel onto the installer, and it boots, and installs, putting grub into the MBR (which may have been a mistake, I gather) and everything's fine. I reboot once, then make a new kernel, reboot and . . . nothing!

At this stage, the bios can't seem to see the hard disk at all - it doesn't list it in the boot menu, or anywhere in the setup (and both of those options take several minutes to display, as if they're searching for a disk, but not finding it). The thinkvantage button doesn't work either - it sits and waits, and after it times out, it just tries (and fails) to do a network boot, same as if I hadn't pressed anything at all. In the setup, the HDD diagnostic reports "Main hard disk drive is not found."

However, linux still works fine, if I boot off USB again - from the linux system, the drive is perfectly visible, and I can read and write to it as much as I want.

So what's going on here? What could I have possibly done that would make the disk entirely invisible to the BIOS? I didn't change the BIOS at all - in fact, hadn't even entered the setup screen once when the problem first started. The only thing remotely related was that I set the system clock in linux using hwclock.

Thanks for any suggestions you might have!

[GomJabbar]

I believe you are a victim of hard drive geometry idiosyncrasies. See last post in the following thread.

Hard disk geometry thread

[jaddle]

Hm.. that's very interesting. I've never had the disk out of the machine for any reason - but if linux detects the geometry differently from the way the BIOS does, I guess it would have the same effect. (since linux ignores the BIOS for such things).

In any case, the problem appears to have vanished on its own! I believe what I did to fix it was to switch the SATA setup from AHCI to Compatibility - it then worked, even after switching it back again. I guess this allowed the BIOS to figure out the 'new geometry' as it were...?