Hello,

I am in the process of installing a new computer with mandriva 2010 (KDE) and at the same time adding some new hardware.

I bought a brand new WD Green 1.5TB SATA II disk which I connected to the computer though a SATA II controller card.

The disc was found properly as sdb and I partitioned, formatted, and mounted it. Everything seemed perfectly fine. (I have an IDE drive with the system on found as sda)

I then started copying files to it from another drive. But all of a sudden I was greeted by an "out of disk space" message. Not knowing what to do I rebooted. This time KDE refused to start since there was no room in /tmp.

I logged on by console and ran a df which only showed me the IDE drive (sda). It also showed that the / share was 100% full. I could still reach the mount folder and empty it so it seems the mounting didn't work as expected.

I emptied the mount folder (and /tmp and /var/tmp) and rebooted again. This time reaching the desktop.

Now two things have happened:
1. The SATA drive is no longer found. The BIOS still runs the controller card and the drive is found, but in mandriva there is no trace of the drive.
2. The system automatically logs me on with my default user.

Why doesn't my drive show up anymore? Is this a known issue with some update or bad mounting? How can I get it back? I have removed the entry for it from fstab but that didn't help (no wonder since it doesn't seem to find the drive at all)

PS. There might have been one or more mandriva updates installed from the repository at the same time as doing this.

You could try to boot into rescue mode and see if the harddrive is recognzied. You could also try to boot into the Mandriva installation cd and see if the harddrive is recognized. You could also check the connectors to the harddrive, but if the BIOS sees it then they should be fine.

Thank you for the reply. The installation CD finds the drive again and I have just completed a reinstall. So it seems that some update downloaded an update which causes the problem. I will have to go through them manually this time to see which one might cause it.

I had a similar problem with ata disk and PCI eSata card wich was recognized
by the Kernel 2.6.31 (Mandriva 2010) but not the disk, after un upgrade from Mandriva 2008 to Mandriva 2010.Here is a solution :

Modules for the sata card are not loaded on boot with the kernel. If you do
"modprobe sata_sil" for example, the disk is recognized. But his not
recognized at every boot, you must do it after each boot.

If you want the disk to be recognized, you must add "sata_sil" into the
"/etc/modprobe.preload" file.