I have used the same fat32 partitioned hard drive (slave drive for extra storage) for years with several different distros. I just installed debian via net install and this drive is not detected; however, it is detected by my bios. To further explain, executing ls /dev | grep hbd, returns nothing. Does anyone have any ideas? I don't even know where to start my investigation.

Thanks in advance,
Bendeco

TRY: ls /dev | grep sd

Also did you mean hdb?

fdisk -l to list them all.


One of the most creative ways to do "ls /dev/sd*"

I did mean "hdb". My drive is IDE not SCSI, so this should show up as hd* not sd*, right? And since this is secondary it should show up as "hdb". Thats what it's always been. Here's the output from "fdisk -l"

Well, it depends if your driver is using the old fashion IDE driver or the new PATA driver which depends on the SATA infrastructure of the kernel. IDE drives using the PATA/SATA layer will be named as SATA disks, sd*.

There's only one disk in there, so, you are either missing a driver (either IDE or SATA/PATA) for your drive, or you need to check your drive and the cables).

PS. Incorrect slave/master jumper setting often causes problems. In any case, check your BIOS setup and see if your BIOS can detect both disks ok.

Thanks for the reply, I will check into the drivers. I know its not cables/jumpers because my bios recognizes it (and as a slave drive). Come to think of it, the drive is over 200Gb and if I recall correctly, there is a kernel option that needs to be active to allow for large partitions.

Actually I read that this is true for hard drives over 160Gb, but the kernel would still recognize larger partitions (but only as 160Gb). For example, a 200Gb hard drive would be recognized as 160Gb. So this isn't the issue since mine isn't being recognized at all.

You may have to setup /dev/hdb by running /sbin/MAKEDEV hdb. I had to do this the other day for some reason.

If it complaines about hdb check the man pages you may need the major and minor numbers

I don't know anything about this. First time I hear it.

I don't remember such an option (and every kernel I use is compiled by hand). And I definitely have two 500 GB hard disks, each of one holding a single partition. So, that shouldn't be a problem.

Maybe you are talking about the 128 GB limit that some BIOSes impose (old ones though).

The theoretical max partition size vary depending only on the file system you use to format it. In any case, it's web beyond the 160 GB limit for any modern fs. Even fat32 can grow up to 2 TB for sure (it should be eight theoretically, I guess). All the limitation you find when formating that fs on windows come from windows itself and it's crappy implementation of their own fs