special device does not exist
 

When Debian Etch (on hdc) is booting, I notice a message that says "special device sde5 does not exist".

What is really puzzling is that this sde5 (fat32) does show up under /, only it is 12GB whereas it should really be 20. It is also present in fstab.

I remember my Sarge having a similar problem although in that case the "non-existent" partition happened to be ext3 and on the same disk and the error was different ("corrupt ext3 filesystem", I believe). The result was the same, though: 20GB showed up as only 12.

My first hard disk is a 250GB PATA (hdc) and it has 35 partitions; the second one is a 250GB SATA (sde) and it has 6 partitions, with XP Home on the first one and the others ones being empty data partitions(ntfs or fat32).

By the way, Mandriva reports a similar problem ("special device sde3 does not exist")but Fedora 6 and Suse 10.2 are doing fine.

Could it have anything to do with Debian and Mandriva being too high up the disk? Debian starts at about 120GB, Mandriva at 180GB. The two are separated by a fat32 partition.

Is there a way of having sde3/5 properly detected?

Could you do an fdisk -l as root and then post the output here?

Most likely need to create a udev rule.

http://www.reactivated.net/writing_udev_rules.html


I know,previously we didnt need too,like a kernel or two back but I have yet to figure out why previous kernels work and current don't.....udev rules work though.