I'll finally break my long silence. Last week my Windows XP has crashed and that made me busy trying to revive it hoping it will go back to normal. Unfortunately I failed. Or I guess I never tried hard to fix it.

But, on the other side, it gave me the opportunity to force my self(and my wife and brother-in-law) to learn to be comfortable in using Ubuntu Linux as our primary desktop OS. What I did was, I pulled out my extra IDE harddisk from my spare CPU which I bought for only P500.

I then installed Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) on it planning to make the SATA harddisk which contains the Windows XP as a slave disk so I can can just mount it under the linux OS and retrieve the important documents from it. But this attempt has also failed. Ubuntu 8.04 just can't detect my SATA harddisk.

I've searched the solution over the net and found that I am not the only one having this kind of problem. I've tried some suggestions from different forums but I still haven't got it working.

Then a few days ago, Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) was released. I opted to choose the path of installing it from scratch rather than upgrading my 8.04 hoping that my SATA harddisk will already be detected. But again, it failed.

Every time I boot my Ubuntu, it halts and displays an alert message telling me that it fails to mount a disk partition. Luckily, I can still proceed by typing the exit command at its prompt.

But today I have finally fixed the problem! At /boot/grub/grub.cfg, this is the configuration file of grub, I edited this original line:
linux /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-21-generic root=UUID=4b5c4d65-6a39-4a87-b714-6e064c715478 ro quiet splash

This is the line that will load the root partition of Ubuntu. I replaced the splash parameter with pci=nomsi and then booom! As I reboot my pc, the alert message was gone! And as I checked the disk partitions using fdisk -l, my SATA hardisk partition was already there! I am now a happy Ubuntu Linux user. I can now recover my important documents especially the research documents of my wife.

I found the solution to this from from this link.

I'm back to blogging again! :)