[ale] gparted can't find drive in Gateway Laptop

[Jeff Lightner]

BASIC QUESTION:
Is there something I need to tell the Gparted on boot that would make it
discover the internal drive?

SYSTEM INFO:
Gateway MX6214 Laptop
Internal Drive is Fujitsu MHV2080BH PL-(S1).   (This is what BIOS shows
and Fedora 7 displayed it as MHV2080B).
(OS on internal drive is Windoze XP Home but since I'm not booting off
that I don't think that should matter).

DETAILS:
Last night I wanted to use the Gparted LiveCD to do something I've done
on various other systems.  To whit copy the existing internal drive to a
USB attached drive for backup purposes.   (Intent to resize existing
partitions and make it dual boot Windoze/Linux - just wanted to save
what was there first "in case....")

The system has a DVD RW (Toshiba) I think.   During boot from the LiveCD
(originally 0.3.4.8 and later downloaded latest 0.3.4.11 with same
results) it shows this DVD drive (the one I was booting from as
/dev/sda).   It seems to have a long delay where it is trying to
discover RAID devices (I suspect because it never finds any internal
hard drive).  Ultimately it goes past that and starts the Gparted screen
but says "no devices found".   Doing the rescan for devices doesn't find
any.

Once I attach the USB drive and do the boot it finds the USB drive find
in Gparted.

I had a Fedora 7 DVD so booted up from it and went through the install
part to see if it could see the internal drive and it did.  (This is why
I downloaded the 0.3.4.11 LiveCD for Gparted thinking possibly there was
something newer in later kernel revisions but as noted that didn't find
it either.)

I did look at BIOS options and saw PlugNPlay and Large File access
settings that recommend "Other" for UNIX, Netware etc... but changing
those didn't help.  None of the other BIOS settings really seemed to
deal with the drive and I don't really think it is a BIOS issue given
that F7 saw it anyway.

P.S.  She bought the laptop last year without asking me so don't tell me
she shouldn't have bought Gateway.  :-)
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