I have an LaCie external disk which connects and works fine via usb but when I try to connect via esata it fails to appear in fdisk -l.

lshal indicates that the drive is associated with /dev/hdd, but so is my dvd drive. So I commented out the dvd entry in fstab, added a lacie entry, ran mount -a and then mount /dev/hdd, but this just mounted the dvd.

The esata is connected via a pci card which is recognised

dell-1 /media # lspci|grep SATA
06:0d.0 SATA controller: Initio Corporation INI-1623 PCI SATA-II Controller (rev 02)

Also, the drive connected via esata is visible at boot up and the size reported.

I am running Debian etch on a Dell Precisison 470, my kernel is

dell-1 /media # uname -r
2.6.15.4-custom

How can I force the external drive to have a unique device path and avoid confusion with the dvd drive?

Many thanks
FN

This thread was an attempt to bump an issue that arose in the midst of another thread. See the final post there to see why this thread can come to an end.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...-drive-635300/