Reinstalling GRUB: Need help please.
 

Hello,
I have Mandriva installed on some partitions and then I installed Windows 7 on another partition and have been using Win7 ever since. Now I need to access some files I left back on my Mandriva desktop so I need to reinstall GRUB so I can boot it up, or I need to get those partitions to mount under a live-CD.

Reinstalling GRUB sounds so simple but from a live-CD I can't seem to get linux to recognize that there's a hard drive present. Trying to mount the drive doesn't work either. It's as if the SDA block device isn't present as far as I can tell.

Any suggestions? I downloaded the Mepis live-CD iso. That's the disk I'm currently using. Is there another flavor of linux live-CD that would work better for this?

Thanks!

What does "parted -l" from a terminal (as root probably) on the Mepis liveCD show ?.

Here's what I get:

Looks like you might be right. It's been years since I looked at Mepis, but I would expect any recent liveCD to contain all the necessary smarts to recognise hardware and load driver(s) for it. I usually just use whatever I have laying around - Ubuntu, fedora, Knoppix, ...
Pick one.

I think I may have solved my problem. My motherboard has SATA 2.0 and 3.0 ports and apparently linux of any flavor doesn't recognize the SATA 3.0 ports. Once I moved those drives over to the 2.0 ports they're clearly listed in the /dev folder. I think I can manage from here. We'll see.

Thanks for taking the time to help.

SATA3 has been supported for ages. I went to a conference where the kernel dev responsible for it was outlining the (then) current status. Had to be at least a year and a half ago.
The chip your motherboard uses might be an altogether different matter of course ...

Glad you got it sorted out.