Hello,
I have recently inherited an old xseries eserver 220 with 1.2ghz intel pentium III processor. I can boot puppylinux fine from the cd, but puppylinux does not see the hard drive even though it shows up in the bios sysutilities and I formatted the hard drive from the bios.

When I doubleclick on the Mount icon, all it sees is the optical and floppy drive

Hi, welcome to LQ!

Can you please post the output of
'lspci' and 'lsmod'?

Chances are that the puppy kernel doesn't know the
SCSI controller that's most likely in the machine.



Cheers,
Tink

I assume I type this in the console?

lspci

00:00.0 Class 0600: 1166:0009 (rev 06)
00:00.1 Class 0600: 1166:0009 (rev 06)
00:01.0 Class 0300: 5333:8a22 (rev 06)
00:02.0 Class 0200: 8086:1229 (rev 0c)
00:0f.0 Class 0601: 1166:0200 (rev 51)
00:0f.1 Class 0101: 1166:0211
00:0f.2 Class 0c03: 1166:0220 (rev 04)
01:03.0 Class 0100: 9005:008f (rev 02)
01:05.0 Class 0700: 131f:2000
01:06.0 Class 0780: 11c1:0480

Some versions of lspci have different switches and may need to be run as root to get all the info. It should give actual names of the devices not just number codes like that.

try lspci --? or lspci --help for switches

probably just lspci -v

in any case, you mentioned formatting the hdd. What info is there in the bios to show how the hdd is connected and have you opened it up to see where the hdd cable goes to?

An inbuilt controller - SCSI or IDE - can be on the board so cable goes into a socket there, or sometimes it's an actual card that goes into one of the slots, so the cable would be seen going to a card.