I have 4) ATA hard drives attached to my motherboard HPT366. During the Debian install I was able to access these 4) drives and create RAID partitions. I did not create a RAID device during install.

I finished the install and updated packages like Apache, Samba, Mdadm and Webmin. I can VNC to my system from the comfort of my living room.

I want to create my RAID but I cannot "see" HDE, HDF, HDG or HDH. They are not mounted yet, they are not part of a RAID array yet. This is where I am stuck.

To verify that I'm not crazy, I checked to see if I could see those drives using Webmin - Hardware - Partitions on Local Drives. Only HDA is visible...

I can't make a filesystem on these drives - they don't exist according to the shell...

I have gone around and around with the install more times than I'd like to admit. Does anyone know what might be wrong???

so the device files are showing up in the /dev directory, right? You see /dev/hda hdb hdc hdd hde etc. Check your /etc/fstab (filesystem table) and make sure that they are listed and mountable. Are they already formatted with any particular filesystem? fat32/vfat ext3 etc? This could be your hangup.

here's the man page for mke2fs
http://www.die.net/doc/linux/man/man8/mkfs.ext3.8.html

check dmesg for device initialation errors

that's my trouble, they do not show up under fstab
I'm reformatting them now... thank you so much for the help! I'll let you know if I get stuck again.

just give them an entry in /etc/fstab

example for an ext3 formatted disk:

then as root do and that should mount the disk in /media/my_extra_disk