Pata drive not seen
Using Ubuntu 5.1 on a new sata drive, it is working well. (My mobo is a MSI 915GL with a Celeron D processer.)

But I can not 'see' my pata drive. The pata drive has 2 primary partitions and I can see them with the disk manager but I can not 'enable' them.

I tried editing the fstab but the Pata did not mount. I've even formatted the pata with an XP disk to be sure I got rid of any residual grub in the mrb. I used gparted to reformat the partitions to ext2.

Any ideas where to look on this?

I would like to use the old pata as a backup drive.

While I'm asking questions, is there a good backup imaging application available under Ubuntu?

Thanks in advance for responses!

have you tried to mount one partition LIVE ie one off without edit of /etc/fstab.

open a terminal and commands may be

su
mkdir /test (can be deleted later)
mount -t ext2 /dev/hdX1 /test
ls /test/ .....to see any files or folders


pata are seen with letters depending on jumper in this structure
hda first controller IDE jumper set to master
hdb....................................slave
hdc second.............................master
etc

eg mount -t ext2 /dev/hda1 /test
then whatever works edit your fstab file with root powers and reboot to test
delete /test if you wish

Tried the above, could see the hda1 partition but can not write to it.

So tried again to edit fstab, hda1 partition can show up in mtab and can see it with file browser, but still can not write to it. Tried setting the umask=777 for hda1 partition with no change.

Any othe suggestions?

Try loading the module "libata" using modprobe.

Tried loading 'libata' with modprobe with no apparent affect.

However, tried reordering the entries in fstab and set file type to auto. Now it is not having a 'failure loading local filesystem' during boot. And if I open the Disks Manager the partition is enabled, and if I browse to the partition I can read and write to the partition. But, if I open the file browser I can read the partition but not paste to it nor write from an applicaiton like text editor.

Close but no cigar.

Any furthur suggestions?

My fstab;

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/sda5 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1
/dev/sda1 /boot ext2 defaults 0 2
/dev/sda6 /home ext3 defaults 0 2
/dev/hdb /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 auto rw,user,noauto 0 0
/dev/hda2 /test auto defaults 0 0

Thanks!

where is hda1 in your fstab? I know you have 2 partitions so where is it pls

2) going back to my old record.....try mounting hda1 with different file systems in case your mbr got messed up....you did not by any chance try putting a new bootloader on there or play with it?

Ok, finally got it.

Ubuntu encourages use of sudo. I could mount but not write to partitions mounted with the Disks Manager because I became root to mount, and mounting as root meant root owned mount places in the file system. So I was mounting as root and could not write to the partitions with the file browser (gnome) because as user I did not have permission. That is why I could (toward the end) write from the browse function inside the Disks Manager (because when I was in the Disks Manager I had root permissions).

Solved!

Gotta watch permissions on files and directories.

Thanks again.