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I recently installed Fedora Core 4 on my laptop onto a USB hardrive. The installation went fine and everything is in working condition. Now that I have installed FC4, I am wondering if it is possible to mount the actual laptop drive. The laptop that I have is a IBM T43. I really need to know this because Windows wont boot (it has nothing to do with installing FC4) and I need to recover my data before I format it.
Distribution: RHEL/CentOS/SL 5 i386 and x86_64 pata for IDE in use
Posts: 4,790
Rep:
Sure, just read 'man mount', 'man fdisk' and man fstab' minus the single quotemarks for the details.
To get you started, you might want to visit http://www.linux-ntfs.org/ because the Windows partition may be nfts and Fedroa does not support nfts partitions out of the box. First create the mountpoint you need to mount the Windows partition then mount the partition, as root type something like;
fdisk -l /dev/hda (that's the letter 'L' and not the number)
mkdir /media/Windows
mount -t ntfs /dev/hda1 /media/Windows -ro
I have the NTFS5 support already installed. I think the problem with this is that the laptop drive is not recognized as being /dev/hdax (x being a number). I have tried this method and it replies with: "mount: special device /dev/hda1 does not exist"
Distribution: Distribution: RHEL 5 with Pieces of this and that.
Kernel 2.6.23.1, KDE 3.5.8 and KDE 4.0 beta, Plu
Posts: 5,700
Rep:
How about using the command ' fdisk -l ' to list all drives and partitions it can see. Post the output. Normally a usb, firewire, or scsi drive is defined as /dev/sd** and IDE drives are /dev/hd**. Never created a bootable usb drive before so I cannot say how one is defined. Once you know the drives device block then mount as Lenard says.
Disk /dev/sda: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 14593 117218241 7 HPFS/NTFS
Disk /dev/sdb: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 1 13 104391 83 Linux
/dev/sdb2 14 14673 117756450 83 Linux
/dev/sdb3 14674 15183 4096575 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdb4 15184 30401 122238585 5 Extended
/dev/sdb5 15184 15693 4096543+ b W95 FAT32
/dev/sdb6 15694 30401 118141978+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
-----------------------
/dev/sda is a USB drive I have hooked up
/dev/sdb is the USB drive linux is on (bootable)
I dont see my laptop hard drive in there. The laptop drive is a 2.5" Hitachi Travelstar, 40GB. I dont know what kind of connection notebook hard drives are (SCSI, IDE, SATA). Maybe knowing this would help so I could get some kind of drivers if needed.
EDIT: I did some googling and found that the Hitachi Travelstar uses ATA-6 interface. Maybe Fedora doesnt include support for this?
Distribution: RHEL/CentOS/SL 5 i386 and x86_64 pata for IDE in use
Posts: 4,790
Rep:
You have a bigger problem with your laptop then not being able to boot Windows. Your Hitachi Travelstat ATA-6 drive is and IDE drive and is supported by Linux;
Distribution: Distribution: RHEL 5 with Pieces of this and that.
Kernel 2.6.23.1, KDE 3.5.8 and KDE 4.0 beta, Plu
Posts: 5,700
Rep:
A t43 should be IDE. You can check by going to www.ibm.com and read up on your systems spec. Why it would not see it seems odd. Is IDE disabled in the bios? Is this a custom kernel and if so is IDE in the kernel?
Distribution: Distribution: RHEL 5 with Pieces of this and that.
Kernel 2.6.23.1, KDE 3.5.8 and KDE 4.0 beta, Plu
Posts: 5,700
Rep:
Reread says that the internal drive is not accessible. Is it still good or has it failed?
Hi Lenard, Not so great on the Acer. It was defective and returned it. No other replacement available so got my money back. Seen one for sale at Staples. Same as yours minus 512mb ram for $799.00. Might get that one.
The drive is completely accessable and has in no way failed. I just cant get into Windows. Windows boots and then justs stalls. It has nothing to do with installing Linux because I have had inux on here for a good while and have been duel booting.
But thats beside the point.
I don't believe I have a custon kernel, but I do have a custom initrd.
I used this line: "mkinitrd --preload=ehci-hcd --preload=usb-storage --preload=scsi_mod --preload=sd_mod /boot/usbinitrd.img 2.6.9-1.667smp" from the rescue CD to make the custom initrd. I simply followed the tutorial here: http://www.simonf.com/usb/ and that worked to get the USB drive booting. When I installed FC4 to the drive, I removed the internal drive from the laptop to force the boot image onto the USB drive. The way I boot is once the laptop turns on, instead of letting it boot to windows i press the Access IBM button. This brings up a screen where I can choose the boot device. Choosing the USB drive boots to FC4, because that is where GRUB is located.
Well, I guess I fixed it.
I tried fdisk -l again after I rebooted and the laptopdrive showed up. I dont understand what I did differently this time, except not having 2 USB drives hooked up. The laptop drive shows up as /dev/sdb instead of /dev/hda. The Linux USB drive is now showing up as /dev/sda instead of /dev/sdb. Is it possible that somthing I have done would only allow for two special devices to be hooked up?
Distribution: Distribution: RHEL 5 with Pieces of this and that.
Kernel 2.6.23.1, KDE 3.5.8 and KDE 4.0 beta, Plu
Posts: 5,700
Rep:
A very strange setup you have. I can't really provide anymore help but wonder what you did as well. When you installed fc4 did you have both USB devices plugged in as well as having the laptop drive unplugged? If this is the way you did it and had installed fc4 on /dev/sdb then this would boot everytime fine as long as you had the other usb drive plugged in.
If the only drive plugged in was the fc4 usb drive then it would install to /dev/sda drive location. Look at /boot/grub/grub.conf and see how locations are defined. I really don't see how it would boot if when installing as single usb drive and later plug in two use drives where fc4 is the second now which would be /dev/sdb.
Redhat - Fedora Core distro work odd on this level. It uses /etc/mtab to define LABELS that is used in /etc/fstab. I have once installed two seperate versions of Redhat on their own drives and had issues. When the first version is installed all is well. I then installed the second with no issues to second drive. On restart it stalled out. Some how it seen both /etc/mtab from each distro and then tried mounting each but of coarse each were mounting to the same point like /home. Example /dev/sda2 was labeled /boot on the first distro and on the second /dev/sdb4 was labeled /boot. Somehow it seen both and tried mounting both to /boot. The fix was to edit /etc/fstab and define each one to there true point like '/dev/sda2 /boot' and not use 'LABEL=/boot /boot'. Once each /etc/fstab files were defined I no longer had boot issues. This might be one of the issues you are running into.
Now you removed the other usb drive and plugged in the fc4 usb drive and the laptop drive. The fc4 usb drive boots fine this way? Seems odd that would work since changes have been made on /dev level. If you have removed the other usb drive and only the fc4 usb drive then I would think you would have issues. Reason is looking at your /boot/grub/grub.conf defines the location of the partitions and where the boot images are located. They should have pointed to /dev/sdb*. Now if you only used the fc4 harddrive and left the other usb drive unplugged and also left the laptop drive unplugged then I don't see how fc4 would boot since it would look for the boot images on /dev/sdb, but the fc4 drive being the only drive is defined as /dev/sda now.
As to why it sees the laptop drive as /dev/sdb I have no clue.
Also see no reason why it limits to two drives. That does not make sense to me either.
Now that you pointed this out, I realised how odd it is that it would work when the drive is sda or sdb. I remember when I had FC1 one on my PC, if I had the HDD cables hooked up in the wrong order, nothing would boot. I think the reason that it works this time could be the fact that I had the internal drive removed during the installation. I reimaged the Windows drive and its booting correctly. No problems on that side. I have yet to get home and plug linux in to see if that still boots. I think it is worth a look to see why it was doing this. I'll check it out when I get home and post the results here.
I have some information to add to the discussion.
There are 2 things that I have noticed:
1) GRUB recognizes the bootable Linux USB drive as being hd0
2) As long as I dont have the second USB HD plugged in, Linux has no problems finding and mounting it.
I'll be sure to post as I find out more about my odd situation.
Distribution: Distribution: RHEL 5 with Pieces of this and that.
Kernel 2.6.23.1, KDE 3.5.8 and KDE 4.0 beta, Plu
Posts: 5,700
Rep:
The hd0 is not really pointing to hd or sd. It means the first readable harddrive whether IDE, SCSI, USB. That is my guess. I have 2 servers and 1 desktop all using scsi drives and in grub the root is all hd0,0. I could be wrong but never really found any detail info on theat line. I know you can use something like that when using windows OS. If it is not in the right sequence you can change which one is actually the first drive even if it is the thrid drive in the chain. Use the map command in grub. Link to info on that.
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