OK, i have 2 hard drives, and 2 optical drives. i have RH 9 on 1 of the drives and i just installed another HD and put Fedora Core 1 onto it. The drive with FC1 is installed into a SATA socket with a PATA adapter. I'm using my RH9 grub with an option for RH, Winxp and now i have to add FC1, when i do installs or look at the drive with my windows ext viewer they say the drive is hdc, but RH9 says it doesn't exist. I need to know how to edit the grub loader to boot FC1 as well as how to mount the FC1 drive in RH9. I wasn't sure if RH9 had a 4 ide device cap like old windows versions. thanks to anyone who can help.

I just finished doing some reading and i found out that the 'append=hdc=ide-scsi' in my boot loader was setting my CD-RW to work as a scsi emulated drive. Im guessing since i installed my new HD it pushed the CD-RW to a different device like hdd?, this would explain why when i load RH9, it tells me the device cdrom doesnt exist. Am i right? so i would i just change the hdc in the 'append=hdc=ide-scsi' command to hdd or hde, which ever work? my other optical drive is a DVD that loads as a cdrom1.

In LINUX, the drives does not move from hdc to hdd on their own. You have to do that manually in hardware. LINUX designates drives as follows.

IDE Controller 1
Primary-Master: hda
Primary-Slave: hdb
Secondary-Master: hdc
Secondary-Slave: hdd

IDE Controller 2
Primary-Master: hde
Primary-Slave: hdf
Secondary-Master: hdg
Secondary-Slave: hdh

I think you moved the CD-ROM to another IDE channel or set it from master to slave while you are trying to mount the hard drive in your computer.

No, LINUX does not have a storage device cap. Only Windows has that.

I suggest reading the grub manual. The config file for grub is usually located in "/boot/grub/menu.lst".

OK here is whats going on now, first thanks for you help, got me to thinking of some things. Now i have my cdrw working again i needed to make a new link file, my cdrw loads as hdc then is is set to scd0 since its a cd burner. Fine, now my dvd is hdd, fine but i still can not locate my sata drive, can anyone tell me what the drive would become? does linux treat it as a scd (scsi) device, a serial (sd) device or a normal hd device?

I know nothing about sata, but

dmesg|egrep -i "drive$|drive "
ls -l /proc/ide
ls -l /proc/scsi

and, of course: google
"sata linux /dev"

nearly all SATA drivers in linux use the SCSI subsystem, so your sata drive should be sda (if its the first sata drive)

thatnks guys i got it working finally, its sdd1, but for some reason it wasnt showing up in any of my atempts to see it or its specs, i applied a few patches and it ended up working. thanks again