I have installed a 120GB maxtor harddrive as a secondary master. My machine is running mandrake 9.

unfortunately, harddrake doesn't see the hard drive, and cfdisk and fdisk say: FATAL ERROR: Cannot read disk drive
when i try to open /dev/hdc

any idea whats wrong, or, more importantly, how to make it work?

thx

Did you check the master/slave jumper settings on the drive itself? Just a thought.

im pretty sure they are correct (the bios recognizes everything fine)

Hi,
You mentioned that it's installed as a secondary master, have you tried to set it as a slave just to see if your system can "see it" as a slave? double check your jumpers and make sure not to set it with CSL (Cable Select) as it's best to set turue master / slave jumpers.

Let us know the results.

Good luck!

thanks i'll try it and get back to you.

1) Did you recently flash your BIOS. Many motherboards still can not read high capacity hard drives. Many motherboards stop at 60 gigabytes or 75 gigabytes.

2) Cable select sometimes work for a last resort. You may want to change the 16 head count to 15 head count because motherboards has different ways of looking up hard drive specs. For example if a motherboard calculates 255 from 16 times 16. It will think that there is not any hard drive.

3) Try replacing the cable. An 18 inch IDE cable is recommended.

4) Did you try running IBM's Hard Drive Utilities. Did you run exercises on the hard drive and check on SMART status.

5) Did DOS see the hard drive. Can you use DOS FDISK and Format on the hard drive. If you have Windows, can Windows access it.