Suse 10.3 doesn't see hard disks
 

When I installed Suse 10.3, at first it didn't see my three IDE disks, only the two SATA disks. On the second attempt I thought it saw them all, but now I notice it missed one. I've spent hours customising it, so I don't want to do another install. Yast hardware information doesn't see it either. And a funny thing is that it designates them all as scsi drives: sda, sdb (the tow IDEs), sdc and sdd (the two SATAs). Might that be the problem, that it won't see more than 4 'scsi' drives? There should be nothing wrong with the fifth drive because that's where my previous Suse installation was on and that still worked fine yesterday.

A few kernel revisions ago, a change was made such that all hard drives (IDE, SATA, and SCSI) are now designated sd. Grub still differentiates between hd and sd for IDE and SATA/SCSI drives.

The problem may involve the setting of the jumpers on the hard drives. Your IDEs should be set as follows:
first cable: a Master and a Slave
second cable: a Master
first sata cable: a Master and a Slave

Then the BIOS CMOS settings have to be set to reflect the jumper settings, With a Primary Master, a Primary Slave, and a Secondary Master for the IDE drives, and a Primary Master and a Primary Slave for the SATA drives.

SuSE usually installs a utility called hwinfo. From the command line, run /usr/sbin/hwinfo --disk. Does it recognize all 5 disks? Have you physically checked the disks to assure that the cables are firmly seated?

hwinfo also only shows the four HDs. The setup is as follows, with the names I've given the drives and the jumper settings:
sda S500 SATA1
sdb S160 SATA2
dvd IDE1, master
sdc WD120 IDE1, slave (end of cable)
sdd WD160 IDE2, master (end of cable)
??? WD250 IDE2, slave
This is reflected by the info in the bios. It's the WD250 that doesn't get recognised. I didn't use the SATA jumpers, because the manual says 'factory use only'. And indeed I thought that for SATAs no jumper settings were needed. Anyway, they get recognised ok. Also, I have 20 partitions in total, but I doubt that's the problem.

Anyway, I tried various drive connections. First, I unplugged WD160 and made WD250 master, and hey presto, WD250 got recognised. To make sure it wasn't a badly seated connector, I changed it back again, but alas, same results. So I tried leaving the drives in place, but switching master and slave, so WD160 slave and WD250 master. And now WD250 does get recognised, but WD160 not. I would have tried unplugging WD120, but that's where the present OS is on.
For a final attempt, I unplugged the two SATA drives, first the one, then the other, then both, but on all three occasions filesystem check failed (??) and I got a prompt.
I'm beginning to suspect the fault might lie with the mobo (MSI K8MM3). Without all drives connected, hd detection by the bios is very slow (about a minute) and sometimes I get a long list of lines starting with 'trans replayed'. But if it's the mobo, then why didn't I have this problem with the previous Suse 10.2 installation?

hi there. I don't know if you totally fixed your problem, but this thread isn't moldy yet, so i'll chime in. I had the same problem with 10.3 not seeing my 80GB and 40GB hd's. I went into Yast's Partitioner and assigned mount points. That was it. Fixed it completely. The drives had labels but no mount points, so I just mounted them as /storage80 and /storage40. Now they show up in my file system just as they should. Hope this helps.

Ed