Hi all,

I think I know the cause of the problem. However am looking for your thoughts as I'm sure others have similar MB's.

I currently have Gentoo installed on my system, with an IDE disk running the OS /dev/hda I have a RAID card with a few disks /dev/sda

I was trying to install Ubuntu 8.04 but /dev/hda can never be found. /dev/sda is found fine (LSI MegaRAID).

The reason I 'think' the IDE disk /dev/hda can't be found is because the IDE channels on the MB come up as the tertiary IDE. The CD/DVD-RW is SATA but the way the MB figures it out, the CD drive ends up as Primary.

So I'm thinking that because the disk is technically on the third IDE channel, the drivers aren't finding the disk.

I've tried every combination of the SATA / IDE settings in the BIOS but each time this happens. Obviously I need both SATA and IDE to install the distro off the CD.

Any thoughts?

Thanks!
>Craig

There's an easy way to confirm if your suspicions are right:

1. Make sure all interfaces have drives and you know how they identify themselves.
2. Run "hdparm -i" as root against every possible interface and record the results.
3. Compare the ID strings with the drives against what interface they appeared on. That'll tell you how the kernel
mapped it.

I just thought of this, and I know is sounds n00bishly simple, but it sounds like the easiest way. At least once you know whether the kernel actually sees everything and where it puts them (hdX and sdX) you can go from there.

Another idea is a problem I had that I never solved (more because it's not a big enough deal for me to worry about):
if you have "SCSI Generic" in your system, the /dev/hdX interfaces won't show up AT ALL--instead, everything on the IDE
interfaces will be mapped to /dev/sgN where N is a number rather than a letter. On my system, this maps /dev/hda (the
CD/DVD burner on my laptop's PATA/IDE interface) to /dev/sg0. Trying to access /dev/hda results in a useless error
(wrong FS type, as I recall), but mounting /dev/sg0 works normally. Give it a a shot!

Mike

What do you see with,

sudo fdisk -l

Hey guys thanks for your replies.

storkus - 1. Make sure all interfaces have drives and you know how they identify themselves. - I know how to identify drives etc. Nothing at all shows up against them.
2. Run "hdparm -i" as root against every possible interface and record the results. - There are no devices at all found. If I plug my RAID card back in I do see the /dev/sda device. However don't want to run the OS off this. I just want to run the OS off the stand alone IDE disk.

Duck2006 - fdisk -l shows nothing at all when run as root.

The strange thing is. I boot off the Gentoo install CD and it sees /dev/hda, if I boot off the Ubuntu CD, it doesn't see it at all.

I'm at a loss with this one.

>Craig

I had a similar problem with kubuntu. After fooling around with it for 45 minutes I installed Debian.

----------------
Steve Stites

Yeah I'm about 8 hours away from putting Gentoo back on unless I can find the reason.

This could be the first time ever that Gentoo has been easier to install than Ubuntu

Hey I found out what was causing this. I IDE HDD was set to Master. I set it to Cable Select and it found it fine. It was still detected as Primary Master, who knows.

Fixed though!

Wow, that is WEIRD!! The only reasons I can think of for this would be
another drive on the same cable set as master or a damaged cable.

One other possibility is all those patches that never get sent upstream
by Debian: since Gentoo is compiled from native (read: clean) sources,
maybe Debian or Ubuntu dropped in a patch that broke something (else).

Mike

Hi all,

I have, nope had, a similar problem. I'm using Ubuntu 8.10 64bit, and I used to be able to access my Windows drive on /dev/hda1 but then it disappeared. Tried fdisk -l and the drive showed up but it was /dev/sda1. Changed my fstab to point to /dev/sda1 and now it's back. Oddly, my sata drive, that I thought was sda now appears to be sdb, and is correctly referenced in the fstab. So dunno what the heck has occurred there. Anyway, might be worth trying sda1 instead of hda1, in 8.10 anyway.

Ian

A lot of this sort of weirdness is caused by which set of disk drivers you have in the kernel. The old drivers reference IDE/PATA drives as hd(x), while SCSI drives are sd(x), and this was preserved because the 2 driver systems weren't connected; the one way to do so was to use the SCSI generic interface. OTOH, the new drivers are intertwined and I've found on my laptop with a SATA hard drive and PATA CD/DVD burner that the drive is sda, as expected, but the burner is now sr0 (SCSI Recorder #0). When I put in my USB stick, I get sdb. If you want REALLY strange, though, my SD flash chip (like for your digital camera) comes up with the very weird designation "mmcblk0" and "partitions" are referenced even stranger, so that to access my SD card I need to execute a "mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 /mnt/hd"--intuitive if you use it a lot, but definitely not if you've never seen it before (the driver writers should be smacked for this, IMHO).

Mike