when i book my system (lots of hard drives), it fails to load 4 of them

below is the output from dmesg, the drives that don't appear are supposed to be hdi,hidj,hik,and hdl.

This is a new debian install and I have yet to have these drives show up for good. Somehow I have booted once or twice and the drives all showed up, but i'm not sure why or how, and they almost always disappeared after rebooting.


I only grabbed the dmesg output pertaining to this. The drives are relatively new, worked fine under windows in a RAID array for about a year with no issues whatsoever. Two matched pairs of drives, 40gb and 80gb

I have had a server down for about 28 hours now because it got really messy while moving from windows to linux as I tried getting these drives working, and these drives make up the backbone of the storage in this server.

the system boots off of a different hard drive adapter, SCSI. There is a total of 4 hard drive adapters in the system:
2 RAID adapters which I just use for normal IDE (these 4 drives are on one)
SCSI adapter
onboard IDE

It is only these 4 drives not working, and i have a feeling that it is because of the fact that they used to be in a RAID array but are now separate drives (since i intend to software RAID them later, separate story)


---------- dmesg output
hdi: HDS728080PLAT20, ATA DISK drive
hdj: HDS728040PLAT20, ATA DISK drive
ide4 at 0xb800-0xb807,0xbc02 on irq 169
hdi: max request size: 1024KiB
hdi: 160836480 sectors (82348 MB) w/1719KiB Cache, CHS=16383/255/63, UDMA(133)
/dev/ide/host4/bus0/target0/lun0: unknown partition table
hdj: max request size: 1024KiB
hdj: 80418240 sectors (41174 MB) w/1719KiB Cache, CHS=16383/255/63, UDMA(133)
/dev/ide/host4/bus0/target1/lun0: unknown partition table
hdk: HDS728040PLAT20, ATA DISK drive
hdl: HDS728080PLAT20, ATA DISK drive
ide5 at 0xc000-0xc007,0xc402 on irq 169
hdk: max request size: 1024KiB
hdk: 80418240 sectors (41174 MB) w/1719KiB Cache, CHS=16383/255/63, UDMA(133)
/dev/ide/host4/bus1/target0/lun0: unknown partition table
hdl: max request size: 1024KiB
hdl: 160836480 sectors (82348 MB) w/1719KiB Cache, CHS=16383/255/63, UDMA(133)
/dev/ide/host4/bus1/target1/lun0: unknown partition table


very urgent issue, looking forward to recieving help

It seems to be seeing the drives OK but complaining because it doesn't understand the partitions on them. Since you said they were formally hardware RAID and have now been split that seems likely why it is telling you that. I'm assuming you intend to do new layouts on them. (Hopefully you've already made backups if you wanted to save anything on them.)

That being the case it seems "fdisk /dev/hdi" (or hdj or hdX...) would allow you to partition the drives the way you want. Do "man fdisk" for details on its usage. Also there is a tool called parted that lots of folks in these forums recommend over fdisk. I haven't used it so only mention it for completeness.

i know how to fdisk and all, i've dealt with all kindsa stuff...


the problem is that the system doesn't end up having the devices /dev/hdi and so on... they just arent there. when i try to fdisk them, [unsurprisingly] it says it cannot open the device.

It looks like it can't read the partition tables so therefore doesn't bother loading the device.

man fdisk revealed that hda-hdh are used to describe IDE drives...


So what is used to describe drives beyond hdh?

i know that there are 4 more drives, and http://u13.net/phpsysinfo reveals that the drives are, in fact recognized... but hdi-hdl aren't friendly with something.

ideas?




edit: hahahaha awesome, i had to use MAKEDEV to add more device names, since linux usually only has devices hda-hdh made by default