I have just installed Mint 13 on a new dual boot (Windows 7/Mint) system. I am booting off of a 128gb ssd divided evenly between Windows and Mint. The boot drive is recognized by both OSs and runs fine. Howver, the 2tb data drive I have installed can't be seen. I have no idea what to do. Running fdisk -l I get:

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Disk /dev/sda: 128.0 GB, 128035676160 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 15566 cylinders, total 250069680 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x8407eaae

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 2048 206847 102400 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda2 206848 125136895 62465024 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda3 125138942 250068991 62465025 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 125138944 216537087 45699072 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 216539136 250068991 16764928 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Disk /dev/mapper/cryptswap1: 17.2 GB, 17167286272 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 2087 cylinders, total 33529856 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x9d919e1d

Disk /dev/mapper/cryptswap1 doesn't contain a valid partition table

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Thanks for any help.

Brian

Did you partition and format the disk?

2T byte disks are at the limit of support for an old style partition table. You might want to look into a GPT partitioning scheme.

See this link for an overview. -->http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-gpt/

I had some trouble with WD 1 TB drives. They use something called advance format. If you use fdisk to partition, you need to be careful things are aligned correctly. The disk stores things in 4k sectors, not 512 as most older disks do.

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Within linux, start the gnome-disk-utility (install it first, if necessary). Select the 2 TB drive. Partition it and format. If you want both OS's to read it, format it to NTFS. It will probably be /dev/sdb since your SSD is /dev/sda.

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I had the same message with rma 1Tb hitachi drive, while using gparted-live-cd, If I recall it just took a right-click & set partition table to msdos.
Then I was able to partition drive.

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Can you post solution please?
That way others can benefit from it.

I kept running into the problem of the drive just plain being invisible to Windows and Linux, so I wasn't able to partition and format. I checked the connections several times and they were solid but finally I moved the drive connector from SATA 3 to SATA 1 on the motherboard. The drive was then visible and I was able to follow the advice above on formatting and partitioning.

Brian

In all this did bios get checked? That would have been my very first step.

I'm glad you got it figured out. Just for our enlightenment, do you know what make/model your motherboard and hard drive are? It would be good to know that there's a combination that doesn't work well together (at least in the original configuration).

I have to admit that checking the BIOS never even crossed my mind (blush). I wouldn't even know how to do it.

As for the motherboard, it's an Intel DX 58SO2 and the drive is a Western Digital Caviar Black 2 TB SATA. Right now everyone is playing well together, but the hard drive currently has one big NTFS partition. I will be taking part of it as an ext3 or ext4 in a few days, after I deal with a couple of other issues.