Moving hard drives
 

Ayup, when I installed Fedora Core 1 a while ago, I had my pc set up as follows,

Primary Master - 80GB (40GB XP, 40GB FC1)
Primary Slave - CDROM
Secondary Master - 10GB removable drive (Fat32 backup disk)
Secondary Slave - CDRW

I set it up like this because I understood it to be better for recording CDs 'on the fly'. I recently noticed that it was causing my hard drives to run at a reduced speed so I changed it to the following,

Primary Master - 80GB (40GB XP, 40GB FC1)
Primary Slave - 10GB removable drive (FreeBSD or backup disk)
Secondary Master - CDROM
Secondary Slave - CDRW

Now it runs at the right speed and by changing fstab and device.map (for grub) in FC1 I can boot into FC1.

The problem is that before I could mount the 10GB drive and access the files but now FC1 can't find it. I checked that the pointers in fstab were changed from hdc to hdb. When I go into the hardware browser in FC1 the drive doesn't even appear, any ideas? Please help, thanks.

well ignoring this "hardware browser" let's look at a lower level... what does "fdisk -l" report about each device? possibly your device mappings have made it inaccessible?

Did you check your BIOS settings? Also, what does "fdisk -l" give you?

John

Since you moved the disk from slave -> master, you'll have to change one or a few jumpers on the hd.
To find them you will probably have to take out the disk. The jumpers are often placed at the side of the IDE-connector with description somewhere on the HD's cover

Sorry I should have mentioned that the jumpers and everything are alright because I can boot from the disk using grub.

fdisk -l gives me

Disk /dev/hda: 81.9 GB, 81964302336 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9964 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 4982 40017883+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2 4983 4995 104422+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda3 4996 9834 38869267+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda4 9835 9964 1044225 f Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda5 9835 9964 1044193+ 82 Linux swap

and that's it, nothing about hdb

Can anyone help me out with this? I can boot from the drive using grub (on the MBR of hda) but can't find it in Fedora since I moved it.

Please help ...

Hi,

I don't understand what you mean by "boot from the disk using grub"? Do you mean passing "root=/dev/hdb" as an argument or something like that?

Certainly "fdisk -l" is telling you that the system isn't even aware of hdb. Does the file /dev/hdb exist? You could try the manpages for cfdisk to see if there's a way of updating the partition table without reformatting anything. BE CAREFUL!

Did you look at your BIOS settings?

Is it feasible to go back to your original configuration, back everything up onto CDs (probably a good idea anyway) and then change the drive back and just reformat it?

John

jkobrien, my system is set up as a multi-boot using grub which is installed on the MBR of hda (the drive with XP and FC1 on). On the other drive I have FreeBSD installed. I have configured Grub to give the following options;

Fedora Core 1 - hd0,1
XP - hd0,0
FreeBSD - hd1,0,a

Selecting the FreeBSD option boots nicely into FreeBSD. I did check the BIOS and it looks fine, and the fact that I can boot into FreeBSD suggests that there are no BIOS problems.

The /dev/hdb file exists.

The only problem I have is letting Fedora know that the drive is there, presumably a file somewhere is telling it to look at hdc still???