linux & BIOS ????

david4 · 08-30-2004, 09:28 AM

Hi there.
My friend has the following problem, he has two hard disks, he disabled one of them from BIOS.
After that he started to install RHEL 3.0 , he used Disk Druid for partitioning . after that he discoverd that he has formated the second HDD (the one which he disabled by BIOS).
how that can happened??.
and can he restore the data (windows Fat32)?...

Bruce Hill · 08-30-2004, 09:51 AM

I don't think it's possible to "disable" a hard drive via BIOS. He might have removed it from the boot order, or asked it not to autodetect, but Linux is going to see whatever drives are attached to the IDE cables - period.

Can he mount the drive in RedHat? Once RedHat is loaded, open a terminal window and type "mount" without the quotes. That will show you which drives are mounted, and how much data is on them. If it shows data is still there, maybe he can get it back. If not, then it depends upon how important the data might be, and how much he wants to pay to get it.

This is what the output of the command "mount" should produce:

Code:

mingdao@paul:~$ mount
/dev/hdc6 on / type reiserfs (rw)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
/dev/hdc1 on /boot type reiserfs (rw)
/dev/hdc2 on /home type reiserfs (rw)
/dev/hdc3 on /usr type reiserfs (rw)
/dev/hdc5 on /var type reiserfs (rw)
/dev/hdc7 on /tmp type reiserfs (rw)
/dev/hdc8 on /distro type reiserfs (rw)
/dev/hda1 on /XP type ntfs (ro,noexec,nosuid,nodev,umask=1000)
/dev/hda2 on /PROGRAMS type ntfs (ro,noexec,nosuid,nodev,umask=1000)
/dev/hda3 on /DATA type vfat (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,umask=1000)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
usbfs on /proc/bus/usb type usbfs (rw)
/dev/sda1 on /mnt/sda1 type vfat (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,umask=1000,user=mingdao)

or something similar. This was produced from Konsole, KDE de in Slackware 10.0 - ymmv...

Edit: If nothing shows from the mount command, then issue "df -h" and then login as root and issue
"fdisk -l" (lower case L) and post the output.

chort · 08-30-2004, 01:13 PM

Well you can disable IDE controllers in the BIOS, in which case no OS should detect the drives attached to that controller (i.e. there are usually a primary and secondary controller, and you could disable one).

As for recovering the data, at this point you'll probably need to use something like The Coronor's Toolkit (TCT) to try to get it back.

Oh by the way, this question doesn't have anything to do with running Linux in an Enterprise Business, so I'm moving it to a more appropriate forum.

Electro · 08-30-2004, 02:24 PM

The best way is to disable a hard drive or an storage device is disconnect it from the cable, so no confusion will occure during making partitions and formatting. I have used diskdruid. Its very easy to pick the wrong drive. Mandrake's diskdrake does not have this problem because each hard drive is seperated by tabs, so you can concentrate on one hard drive at a time. The possibility of getting the data back is very low after you have formatted and put files on it. If it was only a partition table change, it will be very easy to get the data back.

david4 · 09-06-2004, 12:31 PM

thank you for answering..................