I am trying to add a fourth idea drive to my system. My BIOS shows that all 4 four drives are present, but when I do "fdisk -l", the secondary slave doesn't show up. I am running RedHat9, kernel 2.4.xx (newest of the 2.4). All drives are set to cable select. How can I get the fourth drive to register in linux?

Please help! And thanks for any help in advance!

Brian

do you have any errors for that drive on boot? try running "dmesg | grep ^hd" and post the output.

Furthermore, make sure you do not have a hdd=ide-scsi line in the bootloader. If so delete the entry and reboot.

I get this when I just run dmseg:

hda: ST380021A, ATA DISK drive
hdb: Maxtor 7Y250P0, ATA DISK drive
hdc: ST3120023A, ATA DISK drive
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
hda: attached ide-disk driver.
hda: host protected area => 1
hda: 156301488 sectors (80026 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=9729/255/63
hdb: attached ide-disk driver.
hdb: host protected area => 1
hdb: 490234752 sectors (251000 MB) w/7936KiB Cache, CHS=30515/255/63
ide-floppy driver 0.99.newide
Partition check:
hda: hda1 hda2 hda3
hdb: hdb1
hdc:end_request: I/O error, dev 16:00 (hdc), sector 0
end_request: I/O error, dev 16:00 (hdc), sector 2
end_request: I/O error, dev 16:00 (hdc), sector 4
end_request: I/O error, dev 16:00 (hdc), sector 6
end_request: I/O error, dev 16:00 (hdc), sector 0
end_request: I/O error, dev 16:00 (hdc), sector 2
end_request: I/O error, dev 16:00 (hdc), sector 4
end_request: I/O error, dev 16:00 (hdc), sector 6
unable to read partition table

The drive worked in my windows machine... I can only think it is my ide controller.

The errors refer to hdc which is the master on the secondary controller not the slave. Check to make sure the cable is good. Try swapping drives or removing the master to see what happens. Is the jumpers configured correctly on the slave drive?

Sorry, I wasn't paying enough attention when I wrote my first post. I tried changing cables and drives and still get the error. I will try another cable to see if it is trouble.

I set the jumpers at the back of the drive to "cable select", "Master with slave present" (with the other drive as both cable select and slave). However, I still get the same error. I know all of the drives work as I tried them in another computer. Could the mother board ide controller be bad?

Thanks for your help!

Brian