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EDIT: I pulled a Silicon Img ata 133 card from the computer that I had in there and it works fine now. Was the card bios forcing it's ports to come before the onboard ata ports? Strange. Anyway, fixed... for now.
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Hello Everyone.

I've been running an Etch web / ftp / file server for sometime now without issue. Before tonight I had 4 drives in this computer. One on hda (ext3) with the three default Debian partitions, one on hde that was HFS formatted, one on hdi that held my svn repo (ext3) and one on hdk (ext3) that held artwork files and svn working copies for web design stuff. I was having troubles with the IBM drive (mounted as HFSplus at hde) and I new it was on it's way out. So all of a sudden this evening I heard it die... it just kept trying to reset and remount itself. I shut down the server, pulled the drive an did a reboot. It was then that I started to get the error in the post title...

ALERT! /dev/hda does not exist.

and it would go into a shell... Busy something or other... Forgive me, I am not in front of the computer at the moment.

I had never seen this shell before, so I figured maybe I better just reinstall the server... it's fairly quick and painless, about an hour to an hour and a half to be back up full speed.

Popped in my netinst cd, the newest one, and did a complete reinstall, choosing a single guided partition for the system. format and install went smooth. Upon completion - on reboot - I got the same message. So, I thought maybe the boot loader became corrupted or didn't overwrite / formatted correctly.... so I did the install again, this time using a gparted live cd to erase the partitions first.... but I typically just boot to a command line with the cd and run cfdisk, delete partitions and create a new one for Debian to bless it with it's awesomeness. After that, ran the netinst cd again, connected to the mirror for the latest and greatest. This time it booted... so I logged in as root, disabled the cd in my aprt sources list, installed ssh to do the rest from my Mac. Went to my Mac, reboot the Deb PC.

Came back to the same error.

Again, I'm not in front of the computer at the moment, but during boot it will give every indication that the correct drive (which is the only drive in the machine now for installing) is the drive in which I installed Deb... hda, then it stops on trying to find the root of the system and I get the Alert. Right above the alert it seems to be looking that the only drive in the system has shifted from hda to hde, so naturally it can not find anything on hda as it seems to no longer exist by the end of the boot.

I recently wanted to learn how to clone my system - and I wish I had - but being a bit short on drives, I need to find a way to get this up and running. I have an extra drive at work, that I pulled from this machine about a month ago that has Deb installed already, so worst case scenario I will try to pop that in, but I am afraid I will have the same problem since I had hde in the computer (which has now failed) with the secondary hdd as well.

So, my Linux inexperience has brought me here - does anyone know what this could be?

Thank You, I greatly appreciate your efforts!

Regards,
Eric


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EDIT: I pulled a Silicon Img ata 133 card from the computer that I had in there and it works fine now. Was the card bios forcing it's ports to come before the onboard ata ports? Strange. Anyway, fixed... for now.
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