Hello. I'm new to this forum and fairly new to Linux as well.

I was asked to install Linux on an old Dell box which had Windows on it. I was able to do the install. The problem I'm having is that Linux doesn't seem to be seeing the second hard drive.

Under Windows here are the drives I had:

A: Floppy
C: Fujitsu MAN3184P SCSI, 17359 MB
D: LG CD-ROM CRD-8482B
E: Sony DVD RW DRU-500A
F: Samsung SP4004H, 32247 MB

I used the C drive for the Linux installation wiping out whatever was there previously. In my dev directory I can see sda (with partitions sda1 & sda2), hdc (CD), hdd (DVD) and fd0 (floppy). There are no other hd drives nor any xd drives.

The machine hardware was not changed between Windows and the Linux install. In fact I haven't even opened it up yet. The machine is a Dell Precision 340.

The drive I'm missing in Linux is the Samsung. I see a MAKEDEV utility in the dev directory. Do I need to run this to make a device there? If so, I'm not sure what options to specify.


Thanks,
Nick

Have you checked dmesg for information regarding the drive? Try:

You should be able to see if the drive is detected and if it's being assigned to /dev

Thanks. Just checked dmesg as you sugested. Didn't see any mention of the missing drive. Here's a section which looks like it's related to the disks. I can't make much sense of this. Does this contain any leads?


ttyS0 at I/O 0x3f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A
ttyS1 at I/O 0x2f8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A
RAMDISK driver initialized: 16 RAM disks of 16384K size 1024 blocksize
divert: not allocating divert_blk for non-ethernet device lo
Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision: 7.00alpha2
ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
ICH2: IDE controller at PCI slot 0000:00:1f.1
ICH2: chipset revision 4
ICH2: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
ide1: BM-DMA at 0xffa8-0xffaf, BIOS settings: hdc: DMA, hdd: pio
Probing IDE interface ide1...
hdc: CRD-8482B, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
hdd: SONY DVD RW DRU-500A, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
hdc: Disabling (U)DMA for CRD-8482B (blacklisted)
Using cfq io scheduler
ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
Probing IDE interface ide0...
ide0: Wait for ready failed before probe !
Probing IDE interface ide2...
ide2: Wait for ready failed before probe !
Probing IDE interface ide3...
ide3: Wait for ready failed before probe !
Probing IDE interface ide4...
ide4: Wait for ready failed before probe !
Probing IDE interface ide5...
ide5: Wait for ready failed before probe !
hdc: ATAPI 48X CD-ROM drive, 128kB Cache
Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.20
hdd: ATAPI 32X DVD-ROM DVD-R CD-R/RW drive, 8192kB Cache, UDMA(33)
ide-floppy driver 0.99.newide
usbcore: registered new driver hiddev
usbcore: registered new driver usbhid
drivers/usb/input/hid-core.c: v2.0:USB HID core driver
mice: PS/2 mouse device common for all mice

Is it on some kind of controller card that is a lot of IDE channels for just a motherboard. What does fdisk -l as root show can you see the drive there? For you smilie problem you can use the "disable similies in text" post option in future.

fdisk just shows the SCSI drive. Here's the output.

[root@zippy dev]# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 18.2 GB, 18210036736 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 2213 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 13 104391 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 14 2213 17671500 8e Linux LVM
[root@zippy dev]#


I still haven't opened up the machine to look at the how the drives are physically connected or what the adapter is. Is that worth doing at this point?

Most definitely make sure the jumpers are set correctly to master/slave on the drives as linux sometimes does not like cable select at all.

Finally got time to open up the box. There are 3 ribbon cables coming off the motherboard. One goes to the floppy. The second goes to the CD and DVD drives. The third goes to the "missing" Samsung drive. There are no other drives on the ribbon with the Samsung drive.

The drive has jumpers on both the MA and SL pins; none on the CS pins. I don't have the manual for the drive but I found some info online. It seems having jumpers on both MA and SL is master mode but with a 32GB limit. It turns out the drive is really 40GB. I'm guessing that the BIOS on that machine doesn't handle drives larger than 32GB.

This is the page I used to determine the master/slave configuration.
http://erms.samsungusa.com/customer/...=26&PROD_ID=-1

Make sure it is on the farthest connector on the IDE cable plus in the BIOS look around for a boot order setting maybe setting it to boot from IDE first will get it detected, because by rights that F: in windows should really be a D: hard drives are supposed to show up before the CDs in the drive letters. One more thing do you have a Knoppix boot CD handy you may want to try booting with it and seeing if it detects the drive. BTW you did not mention is there another IDE controller card in the machine because that is still a lot of IDE channels getting detected in boot messages.

Thanks to all who replied. I found that the IDE drive was disabled in the BIOS setup. Once I enabled it, hda1 showed up in my dev directory.

Now I just need to figure out how to get it mounted, formated, etc.

Use cfdisk /dev/hda as root to setup the partitions you want on the disk once done reboot to make sure the partition table is read properly then as root again mkfs.???? /dev/hda1 changing the ???? to your choice of file system reiserfs, ext3, ext2 xfs ... and the hda1 to whatever the partition(s) are numbered as. Then you would need to edit the /etc/fstab to add new entry(ies) for the partition(s) you created use the existing entries as the guide or post back if you cannot figure it out.

Thanks Stephen,

I was able to partition, format and mount the drive using the instructions in the Linux documentation.

FYI, it was actually something you suggested which led me to find the original problem. You asked me to put the missing drive into the boot order in the BIOS settings. When I went to do that I found that the drive was not available in the list of drives. That's when I saw that the drive was disabled.

Thanks for all your help.


-Nick