Greetings all-

I am relatively new to linux and therefore am at a loss to figure out why linux will not recognize my new hard drive.

First a little background about my machine- It started off with just one hard drive, a Seagate 40GB/5400 rpm. It was partitioned to contain Win98 and RedHat 8.0. Knoppix worked just fine with this arrangement also. Recently I purchased and added as a slave a Seagate 40GB/7200 rpm drive, with the eventual plan to use one for each OS. I partitioned it with fdisk. However, ever since then, i have not been able to boot into linux. RedHat will apparently recognize the drive (see below) and then hang when it tries to do a partition check. Having no important information on the machine, I took the drastic measure of wiping both drives and while i was at it, switching the jumpers to make the faster one the master. Windows installed just fine onto the new drive, however, when I then attempted to install RedHat, it hung again on the partition check for the faster drive (this time hda). I would appreciate any input regarding what the problem is and possible fixes.

Here is most of what i could see on the screen on my latest attempt to install RedHat, including hopefully all of the relevent info and possibly some that is not.

hda: ST340014A, ATA DISK Drive
hdb: ST340810A, ATA DISK Drive
ide: Assuming 33 MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
hdc: OPTORITECOMBO DC4801, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
hdd: 56x CD-ROM, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7, 0x3f6 on irq14
ide1 at 0x170-0x177, 0x376 on irq15
hda: 78165360 sectors (40021 MB) with 2048KiB Cache, CHS=4865/225/63, (U)DMA
hdb: 78165360 sectors (40021 MB) with 2048KiB Cache, CHS=4865/225/63, (U)DMA
hdc: ATAPI 48x DVD-ROM CD-R/RW drive, 2048 kB Cache
Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.12
hdd: ATAPI 52x CD-ROM drive, 128 kb Cache
ide-floppy driver 0.99.newide
Partition check:
hda:

and there it sits, eventually displaying hda: spurious 8259A interrupt: IRQ7, presumably because I repeatedly pressed random keys in futile attempts to get it to do something.

any help would be much appreciated. Thank-you.

My first knee jerk reaction would be to re-run Windows FDISK on hdb (your 2nd HDD) and remove all partitions on just that disk. Then try booting into Linux again. Perhaps the RH OS is trying to automount the 2nd hard disk automatically for you on boot up? Just a thought....