I'm running a RH 8.0 with the default kernel (2.4.18-14) upgraded to handle NTFS (using the procedure given at http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/info/redhat.html). This seems to have worked, as NTFS now shows up when i "cat /proc/filesystems". The NTFS drive that I am trying to install is a modular bay drive for my laptop. The drive works on my computer, as I had it mounted successfully under Knoppix previously.
The kernel, on boot, detects the drive as /dev/hdc ("hdc: IBM-DARA-218000, ATA DISK drive"), however it does not include hdc1 in the partition list. Not only can I not mount it, however, neither does sfdisk "/dev/hdc" work. It says "no such device or address".

So, besides the obvious solution of putting knoppix back on my computer, I'd like to ask these questions:
a) why does the kernel not find hdc1, even though it should have the NTFS module loaded? Am I going to need to compile a kernel with NTFS in it to make this work?
b) why won't sfdisk (or fdisk) work on /dev/hdc? That should work regardless of the FS type, right? and,
c) what diagnostics can I do to see what's going on here?

I'm looking at the reference you site and it has a number of troubleshooting steps--did you try them? What was the result?

The last step of adding NTFS support to the Psyche kernel is to actually mount it. Did that work and then stop working? Or, has it never worked?

When you are trying to manually mount it, are you doing it as root? If not, try that

My error is not described in the errors located on the web site, so I didn't try any of them; in fact, the installation appeared to go swimmingly until I tried to mount the drive. Mounting the drive does not, nor has it ever worked. Yes, I am root when I try to mount it.

{edit} Well, mounting it worked under Knoppix, when ntfs support was compiled into the kernel. It has never worked under RH8, and that's where I would like to make it work. {/edit}

Okay, one of two things are wrong here. Their was either an error in the install of the NTFS module or there isn't an NTFS partition available to be loaded.

Looking at your initial post, I think we should start with the latter--RH doesn't know the partition is there. Actually, I would clarify that to RH doesn't know the drive is there. What I'm keying on is sfdisk and fdisk not being able to address the drive.

I would like some specifics on the "kernel, on boot, detects the drive as /dev/hdc ("hdc: IBM-DARA-218000, ATA DISK drive")"--when does this happen?

When my RH 8 loads, I can see it mounting the partitions, but I don't think it tells me what type of hard drive I have. The only place I see that is when it is displayed by the BIOS.

The only place I can think of during the boot process where this might be displayed is when RH's kudzu starts looking for new hardware and finds some. Is that when you are seeing this?

If this is the case--that RH just not installing it properly--you could try a fix that previous versions of RH have needed for loading devices (RH 7.2 was notorious for not wanting to load the CD-ROM it had installed from). As root, type this:

depmod -ae

Post back with whether or not sfdisk will now see the drive.

Alright, first off, thanks for the detailed reply. depmod -ae did not work, I ran it and was still unable to see the device with [s]fdisk.

The kernel log detects the hard drive after going through some bios checking; I've posted the log at http://llimllib.f2o.org/log/dmesg if you want to look through it; search for "hdc" to find the relevant section.

Finally, I have a new idea of where the problem might be. Since this is a laptop bay hard drive, I had the CD-RW in the bay when I installed RH. Currently, I have the hard drive in the slot where the CD-RW was. Also in the kernel log, there is a line that says "Kernel command line: ro root=LABEL=/ hdc=ide-scsi". I'm wondering if the hdc= part is messing it up. Where does one change the kernel command line so that I could play with it? maybe the ro (which should mean read only, but what does it make read only) messes it up?

Okay, found where that command line is stored, in /etc/grub.conf. I'm reading the manual on it now, and I'll start to play with it soon. I'll report on any interesting developments...

Ok, so I removed the "ro" and "hdc=..." statements from the kernel command line, and was able to mount the HD after a reboot. This leads to further questions, which perhaps I should post as a new thread. Where do I find documentation of my kernel's command line switches? What, exactly, did I do (I get the general gist of it)? Will I need to replace the "ro" and/or "hdc=..." statements to boot with my cd-rw enabled? Why were they there?

Any ideas?

Since this is the part of your question I know something about I'll give info, may not be all the answers but it should answer some whys and point you to the hows. If you already know any of this I am sorry, the boards don't come with a query knowledge of poster command yet. If it's all way over your head you can chose to either read up on it or settle for just using one or the other of the drives. If you get into it and get stuck on some specifics then feel free to ask more questions, hopefully someone has the answers.

Linux sees drives as hda (primary ide master) and hdb (primary ide slave) and hdc (secondary ide master) etc... When the install saw you had a CD-RW (I'll just call it CD for now) as hdc it set itself up to use the CD. First it treats it like a CDROM drive and set it to "mount" in read only mode also known as ro since CDs are read only. Then it set up the ide-scsi module which is needed to burn CDs since burning software in Linux talks to SCSI drives only and ide-scsi is used to fake this software out for IDE burners. When you put a hard drive in it's place Linux tried to load the CD options but choked when it saw the regular IDE drive. That drive bay on your laptop is just a fancy way of plugging in a drive to the secondary IDE on the laptop board.

The good part to making Linux work with either the CD or the HDD is that it probably made a symlink (don't worry if you don't know what that is yet) to hdc which is actually /dev/hdc and called it /dev/cdrom. Some people like to use /dev/cdr or /dev/cdrw but any of these works and is more of a user preference. Now when you try to get it to READ CDs you can use seperate options for /dev/cdrom and for /dev/hdc so when you call whatever you have plugged in a cdrom it will do the right things for your CD but if you call it hdc then it will set it up as a hard disk.

More info on how to do this can be found in the man page for fstab or mount (man mount or man fstab in a console window) and probably in HOWTOs for CD-ROMs and hard disks, check out www.tldp.org for those HOWTOs Then when you have the CD reading and the disk working as an NTFS partition you can check out the CD Burning HOWTO which should have info on getting that ide-scsi thing to load at the right time and how to actually burn CDs.

This is some more advanced info, if it's gibberish to you, write it down or copy it somehow and you can use it later to set up Linux as you follow the HOWTOs.

To get the ide-scsi loaded *I think* you can link it to /dev/cdrom (I don't know exactly how, just that it's what needs to be done, *sorry*) or add a "modprobe ide-scsi" line to the scripts that run whatever burning software you pick to use, again I'm at a loss as to specifics and again I apologize.

And finally info similar to this will go in /etc/fstab at some point. The specifics to make your computer work with both will probably either come from trial and error or finding a more specific message board for laptops with linux. I've seen docs for CD burners and for NTFS partitions but none so far on swapping one for the other:
And so ends another one of my novel sized posts...FYI to any moderators reading this, it may help to move this into the hardware forum at this point.

Darin,

I want to thank you very much for your help. I understood everything that you were saying, and I didn't know that I could have both devices treated differently via a symlink - which was what I was trying to figure out how to do. I'm going to goof around with it for a few days, and If I can't figure it out, I'll ask some questions in the hardware forum.

Thanks Again.