As I boot into the Ubuntu 10.10 (or 11.04, doesn't matter) live environment or installer, it just refuses to recognise my Vertex 2. It reports the disk as ATA and not supporting smart, shows no serial number, and doesn't list the size correctly.

All fdisk tells me is Unable to read /dev/sda (it's the only storage in the PC).

I'm now running a temporary install of Windows 7 off of it, which worked like a charm, so where am I going wrong with Ubuntu...

Specs:

• Asus M4N68T-M LE V2 (BIOS 0702, most recent)
• OCZ Vertex 2 SSD 60 GB
• Amd Athlon II X4 640
• Patriot PSD34G13332 4GB DDR3 ram (two banks)

EDIT
I installed a second drive, installed Ubuntu on that and booted, it recognised the SSD just fine. I'm now trying to apt-get upgrade the live-environment. I wonder if there is any way to sort of install Ubuntu from Ubuntu (I boot into the working install on the other drive, install it on the SSD and then boot from the SSD).

EDIT2
Ok, so that doesn't work. The install detects the SSD, however, it cannot format it.

EDIT3
After a fresh boot I can read out SMART-data and even perform a read-benchmark, but if I try to format it, or do a write-bench, it'll crap out and after that it says SMART is not supported. So basically it seems I can't write to the disk, as it will stop working when I do, I will try to run repeated read-benchmarks to see if that has any effect.

EDIT4
I'm running several read benchmarks on the drive right now, they give results that are to be expected from an SSD. If the read-benches don't fail, I can use fdisk on the disk, but it is now stuck trying to re-read the partition table after issueing the 'w' command.

EDIT5
Parted Magic did recognize the drive and with hdparm -I even could tell me the drive was in a frozen state. I powercycled it (just pull out the plug from the SSD and plug it back in) and it wasn't frozen anymore. After that I could upgrade the firmware on the drive (still using Parted Magic) and format it to Ext4. After I rebooted into the Ubuntu installer, it wouldn't get recognized and hdparm didn't want to talk to it saying HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(identify) failed: Invalid exchange.

EDIT6 For some reason if I enable one of the RAID controllers (the one the SSD is connected to, obviously) Ubuntu will let me format it, mount it and write to it. The installer also recognizes it. However if the raid controller is enabled but no array is defined the motherboard can't boot from it :(