Dear guys,


I have two working IDE drives in my deb 4 box and have just installed a new drive in the machine, it is 500MB SATA interface. The machine is just used as a desktop running KDE - I use it for internet, email and also openoffice packages. Keep family photos on it etc.

I have connected the sata cable and power lead, but how do I get the Deb 4 system to recognise its presence?

Also will I need to use fsck or something like it to format the drive before it can be used?

Thanks,
Greeb

If you're using a gui, then just fire up GParted to format the drive. If you don't have a gui, you'll have to use something like cfdisk to format the drive. Then you can mount it by editing fstab.

I tried gparted and it sees hda1 and hda2, but not the new drive, so stuck with that.

I also tried a debian disk manager tool from the gui, and that saw the new drive but doesn't allow formatting etc

Thanks,
Greeb

You need to partition before being able to format the drive. You could always try qtparted this allows you to partition/format the drive or use as root from the command line cfdisk /dev/sda assuming sda is what it gets detected as you should take a look at the output of the dmesg to be certain. If you use cfdisk then once opened go to new option with the right/left arrow keys choose primary for the partition and accept the default with the whole drive being selected (if this is what you want) once this is done choose type 83 Linux for the partition and when finished use the arrow keys to go to write to write the new partition table at this point I always reboot to make certain that the partition table gets properly read you can see this in the dmesg output with a hardrive plus sda1 on it when it gets detected. Once rebooted use as root mkfs.????? /dev/sda1 replacing the ????? with the file system you want ext2, ext3, reiserfs, xfs .... once you have the file system on it you will be able to mount and use the drive and will most likely want to edit the /etc/fstab to put a new entry in it so you will always have it available on boot.

Thanks, have been away a few days will try this out.
Best,
Greeb

Hi - I tried this

cfdisk /dev/sda

and got the message 'fatal error cannot open disk drive'

If I use the Debian disks manager from kde, it sees the sata disk and recognises it as /dev/sda

any further help much appreciated

Thanks
Greeb

That is weird it should see it maybe try installing qtparted to see if it will let you partition the disk then there is always fdisk but that thing gives me a headache trying to figure out the raw sector numbering needed to get it to work. You may want to post the fdisk -l output as root so we can see how everything is getting detected.

I had the exact same problem yesterday - external SATAII 500 Gig.
Even XP wouldn't talk to it.

Eventually got a Vista machine to initialize (???) it. No partitions, no formatting.
Then both XP and Linux were happy to partition it - I can't explain why.
Another (Linux) laptop (Inspiron 1100) wouldn't talk to it at all, even after formatting - may be a BIOS issue, although it is at the latest level available, and is running 2.6.23 kernel.

That was my solution, may work for you too.