I have an old ibm thinkpad 390x and I want to put puppylinux on it. I tried to repartition the hole disk with puppy but it did not work so I took out the disk and put it into a usbcase. Then I formated the disk under suse and it worked fine. When I put back the disk into the IBM thinkpad the bios do not recognize the disk. What did I do wrong? Whats missing? Anyone!

Thanks a lot in advance.

I should inform that when I boot with puppy live I cant se the hardisk. And in bios its turned off for booting and I can not turn it on.

When you boot to the live disc, your computer should ignore the hard drive.

Is your IBM set to boot from the USB port? If not, it will not boot from the hard drive.

I use the live disc of Damn Small Linux to examine the contents of hard drives or external hard drives with USB connection

Thanks for the responce.

I think I didnt express myself clearly.

Its no problem booting from a live distro. But I ca not see the harddisk at all from the live distro and its on ide. If booting without CD the computer does not recognize the harddisk and I can not set the harddisk as an boot option in bios.

When you verify jumper settings and cable connections? How did you format the disk (size, filesystem, etc)? I wonder if the BIOS reads disk geometry and the format may have changed it to something the BIOS doesn't understand.

I think its crashed, broken and totaly dead. I got a new (old 12 gig)one from a friend.

The hard disk did oit even showup on

/sbin/fdisk -l

or df -h

and I tried all jumper settings.

Thanks for your respons anyway.

Kalleanka,

I have a computer running Ubuntu Feisty Fawn with a 160 gig hard drive. When I boot from the hard drive, it runs the operating system and the applications from the file system on the hard drive.

I just booted the same computer from the Ubuntu Feisty Fawn Live CD. The hard drive does not show and the computer file system is contained in the RAM memory. That is what is supposed to happen. It allows you to run from the Live CD without accessing or altering the hard drive or the operating system it contains.

My Ubuntu Live CD has a copy of GNOME Partition Editor under "System", "Administration". If you start up the partition program it should show you the hard drive, its size and partitions, and the file type (ext2, ext3,). But you will not bee able to run any programs that exist on the hard drive as it is not mounted or accessible. At least you will see if the hard drive is functioning and Linux can quiry it.

Try that and let me know what you find.

Roger in Hawaii

You may have connect the drive incorrectly or the fragile cable has a very, very small fracture. When the computer comes on, does the hard drive light come on or blink. Is it always lite steadily?