Hi guys!
I wanted to ask you:
which device could be /dev/hde? Because my HDD is listed as /dev/hde.
I think that maybe my IDE cables are in the wrong places, because I have only on hard disk and it's listed as /dev/hde. Man this is strange....

got onboard raio or something going on? it's just plain not possible to have an hde if you only have two ide channels on your board. i have hde to hdh courtesy of my IDE card...

Hi acid. Well what did you mean by raio? I have no radio nor raid. I too find it VERY strange. I have a cdrom that's /dev/hdb and a cdrw that's /dev/hdd. And my HDD is /dev/hde. Even when the PC boots up I see the screen:
Primary Master.... None
Primary Slave.... My cdrom
Secondary Master..... None
Secondary Slave.... My cdrw
This is the problem I have since I bought my PC. I think that is some bug or something with the HDD or the cables are mixed up. But the <not smart> salesman that sold me the PC says that it's no problem. So do you have ny ideas guys?

Where is your drive plugged into? The motherboard, or a controller card or what?

The motherboard I guess. Well I see it's plugged into the motherboard but how to be really sure? How does a controler look like?

Just one other interesting thing :
Did you recently try any BIOS update ? Since this sometimes really helps to fix location problems ... you should give it a try.

First of all you'll for sure have to identify your mobo. I hope you opted for a no-name PC instead of "brands" like Compaq or HP (on those two last you'll have to fight hard to identify the mainboards ...)

May the luck be with you !

Well no I didn't update my BIOS. And the mobo is:
Asus A7V with a VIA Apollo KT133 Chipset if it's important.

... then, it could be nice to do it.

Make a very light & bootable floppy disk (MS-DOS is fine for that) and place on it the basic boot files (make it by DOS command "format a: /u /s" without the quotes of course) plus copy on it the BIOS update files you'll be able to find on :
http://download.asus.com.tw/mb_alllist.asp
(website unfortunately down for a while ... server upgrade I hope)

Info on how to flash your BIOS
http://usa.asus.com/inside/flash_mb.htm

This will be the first step to be sure the basic functions of your system are fully functionnal.


Cheers.

i meant raid of course... oops!

It is still possible that you do. Computers that have RAID capabilities actually on the mobo will usually also function as 4x controller. The bit above (in your quote) shows that your CD and CDRW drives are in place nicely... but no mention of your harddisk. If, however, your harddisk is the master on the 3rd controller (which could be used as part of an IDE-RAID setup), then it would appear as hde. If you check inside your computer, you should therefore see that you have seperate cables going from your mobo to your harddisk, cd and cdrw drives. If you do not have 3 seperate cables, then there's something amiss. If you do have 3 seperate cables, and you are not happy having your harddisk as hde, then swap the cables over with your cdrom drive and reboot... but don't expect to be able to boot Linux immediately if you do!

Also look for a "black square" with some company other than your board man on it. This is sometimes a controller chip. You can probably find out from your mobo book if this is indeed your situation.

COol

Hi guys!
Guess what, I really have a raid controller and didn't even know this! Sheesh I even almost turned off raid support in the kernel Well I think I won't touch it for now because well if it works I'll better leave it as it is. But it's good to know that if I'll ever need to change my HDD to be /dev/hda, I'll know how to do this. Thanks for your help guys!

My CD-Rom is hdc, & my CD-RW is hdd, but I am not worried about it.

Ed, I am not sure what you meant by your response???

As for your CDRW being hdd, can you burn with it still?

Shouldn't it be /dev/scd0 or something like that?

Anyway...

Cool

Oops! Yeah my cdrw is /dev/scd0 and I can burn with it Thanks again for the help guys!