So I decided to try the latest Ubuntu and everything is fine and dandy except it doesn't recognise one of my hard drives. It sees my Seagate drive which was formatted under XP, but not my Samsung partitions which were formatted under Windows 7.

Specifically, in Disk Utility it shows both drives under my SATA Host Adapter, but it shows that the HD103UJ is partitioned into 2 500GB volumes which it shows as "unknown scheme". It doesn't show the SMART Data or several other options either. I've tried swapping the SATA ports around but it still only sees the XP volumes.

Any ideas? This drive has pretty much all my stuff on - the Seagate just has XP on!

Thanks.

In the BIOS, under your SATA controller, are all the ports set to the same thing? I.e. either IDE compatible or AHCI? Ubuntu doesn't seem to like it if some are set to one and the others another, even if they're not in use.

Thank you for your reply, which does seem potentially relevant.

It's not actually possible to set them to different things in my BIOS. If I set it to IDE it doesn't recognise either disk correctly. It's set to AHCI at the moment.

I'll double check when I next reboot, but at the moment I'm in XP copying several hundred gigs of "important files" off the Samsung in case it all goes wrong

Well my next question is, and I really should have led with it, when you installed Ubuntu did you set a mount point for your other partitions/drives?

Thanks for your advice thus far. Unfortunately it seems this is nolonger a Linux issue. Having copied all my stuff off, I tried reformatting it from XP and it all went a bit wrong. Long story short, the drive no longer appears in the BIOS concistantly. I've tried a different SATA lead on a known working port, and it still keeps "vanishing" from the system.

I'm going to see if Samsung have a disk checking utility and go from there.