Installing an IDE disk
 

Hi,


I'm trying to install an extra harddisk into my linux system. I plugged it into the system on the secondary IDE controller as master. Dmesg shows the disk:
hdc: QUANTUM FIREBALLP KA18.2, ATA DISK drive

But when I try to partition it (fdisk /dev/hdc) I get the following message: Unable to open /dev/hdc. There currently is a windows system on the disk (which can be deleted), but I don't think this has anything to do with it.


Your help is much appriciated!

Do you have another device on the secondary IDE cable (such as a CD-RW) that also is jumpered to be the master? Ordinarily, my primary IDE cable is attached to my main HD (jumpered as master), my CD-RW is attached to my secondary IDE cable (jumpered as master) and my secondary HD is attached to the secondary IDE cable (jumpered as slave). As I'm sure you know, having 2 masters share the same cable will cause problems. -- J.W.

Nope.. I've got one disk as master on the primary controller and the other one as master ont the secondary controller. There used to be a cd-rom as master on the secondary controller but I changed this with the new disk (though I didn't change any software config, I just plugged out the cd-rom and plugged in a disk)