I have installed FC6 and am getting weird messages when accessing the second and third pata drives.

Hardware
Intel 845GLV MB (ICH4)
IDE 0 master WD 40G (hda)
IDE 0 slave Seagate 120M (hdb)
IDE 1 master CD RW/DVD
IDE 1 slave Seagate 120M (hdd)
No SATA
768M

I have installed Windows (both XP and Server 2003) and FC 4 and FC 5 as well as CentOS on this machine in the past and all have had no problems with the HD.

When I went through the FC6 install I chose a custom drive layout and setup swap, boot, and / on the 40G as swap, ext3, and ext3 respectivly. At the partiton layout screen, /dev/hdb and /dev/hdd did not show up, instead there was a single entry called /dev/mapper with no partitions. I decided to leave this as is and intended to setup a single LV on hdb and hdd post install.

The install and initial boot went well. Logged in as root and proceeded to use pvcreate to start the LV process. pvcreate came back indicating that /dev/hdb was in use by the system and busy. pvcreate then indicated the same for /dev/hdd.

Next, I started fdisk and was allowed to create a single primary partition on both hdb and hdd. After writing this to the disk I used mke2fs on /dev/hdb and got an error that the disk was mounted. So I rebooted.

After reboot, I tried all of the above on hdb and hdd and got a message that they were not block devices.

Upon inspecting dmesg, all hd drives (hda, hdb, hdc, and hdd) were successfully probed on ide0 and ide1. The log showed no odd messages.

So, I figured that something was being left on the drives from the many different installs in the past and used a seagate tool to zero the 120G drives. After reboot, same commands with same results as above.

Into rescue mode I go and guess what, /dev/hdb1 and /dev/hdd1 could be formatted and mounted with no problem!!!. So I started anaconda again and on the custom partition screen /dev/hdb and /dev/hdd did not show up in the list but /dev/mapper did with no entries under it.

Booting into FC6 after all of this I got the drive busy and not a block device messages as above.

When looking at /dev/mapper I have two entries, one is control and the other is an apparant set of random characters. root:root are the owners of control and root:disk are the owners of the other entry.

Thinking the install/media might be bad, I reinstalled FC6, this time with a network install from a mirror and got the same results.

Any ideas?

Don