How to register new HD with OS?

johnfman · 03-19-2008, 11:42 AM

OK, one of my customers has put a new 500G drive into one of the slots in a Dell rack server. The box is running RedHat 4.3. I want to partition the drive and make filesystems, but nothing in the OS (that I know of) recognizes the new drive. There are no additional /dev/sd* files, no additional /dev/hd* files; lvm isn't aware of it, and the dmesg messages dont mention a new drive at all.

Is there a utility I need to run that will find the new drive and make it visible? I'm stymied!

Thanks,

John

kilgoretrout · 03-19-2008, 12:54 PM

Is the new drive detected in the bios setup? If not, it's probably defective. If it is, see if your system can see the drive by running:

# /sbin/fdisk -l

and/or:

$ cat /proc/partitions

BrianK · 03-19-2008, 12:55 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by johnfman

Is there a utility I need to run that will find the new drive and make it visible? I'm stymied!

There is no utility, per se, other then the typical tools.

as root or sudoer, do an "fdisk -l" If it doesn't show up in that list, then the computer doesn't see it. It's likely a BIOS issue at that point... maybe the port the drive is plugged into is setup for RAID in the BIOS? Maybe the BIOS is set to some sort of legacy combo mode for IDE/SATA that remaps the ports & the port the new drive is on has been mapped away?

fdisk -l should show you all the drives on your system, however, so that's where you want to start.

theNbomr · 03-19-2008, 02:05 PM

Try

Code:

dmesg | grep -i ata
dmesg | grep -i scsi

See if the new drive shows up somewhere. With a distro that ancient, it may be that the kernel cannot recognize a modern drive due to its capacity or the type of interface. I doubt that the BIOS is an issue. I've seen numerous cases where the drive hardware was not recognized by the BIOS, but the linux kernel still handled it properly. Mind you, that was not on a pre-2.x kernel....
Strongly suggest upgrading.
--- rod.

BrianK · 03-19-2008, 07:33 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by theNbomr

With a distro that ancient, it may be that the kernel cannot recognize a modern drive due to its capacity or the type of interface.

I believe he meant to say RHEL 4.3, as I don't believe any redhats prior to 6 actually worked well enough to still boot today.

good idea on dmesg, though.. always good to check there too.