I am using redhat 9 and it is working correctly. I have my old harddrive which has windows 98se on it. I have installed this harddrive to the second plug on the ide cable and set the jumper pins to 'slave.' I have tested the harddrive to make sure it works by disconnecting the other one and setting the jumper to master, it boots windows fine.

I want this windows harddrive to be accessible by redhat9. During bootup I see 'initializing hda' then 'initializing hdb', so redhat9 must be seeing this second harddrive.

/sbin/fdisk -l lists only hda1 hda2 and hda3
/sbin/fdisk /dev/hdb says 'unable to open /dev/hdb'

mount -t vfat /dev/hdb /win98 says 'not a valid block device' and the same goes for dozens of variations and options of this command I've tried

Please help me with what steps it takes to get this windows harddrive accessible.

Thanks a lot,
-Dave Johnson

Clarify.

There are 2 IDE plugs on my motherboard with flat cables plugged into them. These flat cables have 2 plugs on them each, not including the end plugged into the motherboard. The first cable is plugged into both of the harddrives and the second is plugged into both of the cd roms.

what does "dmesg | grep hdb" report back? are you sure that the slave jumper settings are actually correct?

Kernel command line: ro root=LABEL=/ hdb=ide-scsi
ide_setup: hdb=ide-scsi
hdb: WDC WD800JB-00CRA1, ATA DISK drive
hdb: driver not present
hdb: driver not present
hdb: driver not present


Slave pins must be set correctly. I read western digital website just to make sure. Also, bios detects it correctly as slave.

With scsi emulation, /dev/hdb would be a scsi device. Either use the scsi device (might be /dev/sda not sure) or remove that line from the parameters passed to the kernel in your /etc/lilo.conf or /etc/grub.conf .

It worked!!

Thanks!