Hi,
I just scrapped Windows. Before I did, I installed suse 10.1 on a second drive(slave) and still had windows running on the primary. So I had a dual boot sys. Then I decided I just wanted to bite the bullet and use only linux, so I moved all of the files from my windows drive over to the slave drive running linux(music, docs, pics, etc.) After this I decided to install Suse 10.1 onto the primary drive...and my plan was to just plug in the slave drive with linux (and my files from the old windows disk), music, docs, pics, etc. on it and transfer the files I moved from the windows drive to the new primary linux system I installed. Now the drive that windows used to be on has a fresh copy of suse 10.1. The slave drive also has linux on it but will not boot on its own, or when hooked with the primary drive.

So to recap a bit, in case you are confused, and you might be...
1. I had windows on primary drive
2. I hooked up a slave to it and installed suse 10.1 on the slave
3. I transferred music, docs, pics, etc to the slave drive in suse
4. I installed Suse 10.1 onto the primary drive (deleted windows partition, the whole 9 yards) w/o the slave drive attached
5. I attached the slave drive with the ribbon cable,
A. the system will not boot
6. I unhook the slave drive
A. The new system boots.
7 Can I retrieve my files from the slave drive?

got questions?

thanks in advance from the noo noob, still wet behind the ears

hi,
I don't see any problem with bootloader.
just one thought coming to my mind that why you can't boot machine with slave on it. There may be 'jumper' problem.
when you are connecting the slave drive, are you connecting it with jumper or after removing the jumper ?
whatever you are doing, try other way round also.

regards

regards

You may need to check the jumpers on the drives. Also, check in bios on which one it is trying to boot.

If the old master drive is different, you may want to unmark it as the default drive. fdisk can do that.

Thanks for the help, I still cannot see the drive. When I removed the jumper from the slave drive the boot process began and it wanted to boot from cd , but that option was not enabled in the bios, only boot from HD was enabled as 1st boot device. Then it said disk boot failure. Well I know the primary drive wasn't being queried for that to happen. So I took the drive off of the first IDE channel and put it on the 2nd IDE channel by it self (the problem drive, that is). And so now I have the primary drive on channel 1 and the other drive on channel 2, no cd attached. It boots up fine, and when it searches the IDE channels it shows IDE 1 Master to be my primary and IDE 2 to be the other drive. So it sees the drive. When Linux loads I do not see the second drive anywhere in the file system. are there other ways that I can try to access the drive, like you do in Windows in a pure dos enbvironment? If so, point me in the right direction. Or am I looking in the wrong place within linux?

Thanks for tha help
pk

Hi prophetk

I wonder do you know about the mount command?

File systems on hard drives & other storage systems are not neccessarily mounted (made visible on the system) and definitely won't be if you installed without the other one plugged in.

to mount a filesystem do this:

create a mount point

cd /
mkdir media you could call this mnt or something else if you prefer
cd media
mkdir hdb or whatever you want label your other hd
su - notice the hyphen
enter root passwd

mount hard drive b on /media/hdb

mount -t auto /dev/hdb /media/hdb
Ctrl-D to logout of root
cd /media/hdb
ls -l list contents of root directory on hdb

You can create more directoies under /media for your floppy drive, cd, cdrecorder, usb drives etc

check out the command man fstab to see how to have these mounted automatically & for shortcuts if using the mount command.

Also use the umount command to un mount things - important for getting the CD back & not corrupting files that might have been copied there.

Check out the books that are for sale along with new distibutions of linux.

Hope this works for you.

Read this for mounting drives in linux

regards

Ok I have seen some light. The other drive id hdc, it shows hdc1, hdc2, hdc3, when I type the mount command: mount -t auto /dev/hdc /media/hdc (i have already created those directories) then I get a message that reads: mount: you must specify the filesystem type
when you reply could you explain why you are telling me what to do,
Thanks a lot for all of the help.

btw, I read some of that info on how to mount drives in linux, and , um, what is a bash# prompt? I just typed fdisk -l from within terminal and the info came up. That was very confusing for me, because I was thinking that I had to get to this bash# prompt before I could get the info I needed.

anyway, thanks again in advance for any help.

"let the prophets prophesy"

Hi,
some times you have to specify the filesystem type you are trying to mount. It may be vfat or NTFS etc. Use google or search in this forum only, you will get numerous posts on this topic.
And reagarding that bash '#' prompt, thats nothing but your terminal prompt. Be it $ or # doesn't makes any difference, e.g in windows its like "c:\>".
search in google without quotes:
"mounting site:linuxquestions.org"

regards

Huzzah! I did it! The reason I needed to get to the files is because I believe the drive is going bad. So when I got home from work today I compiled everything I knew about dos commands, and coupled that with what I was show in this thread, and from mounting file systems, and I got this:

mount -t reiserfs /dev/hdc2 /media/hdc
also did this for hdc3 ...( and the reason it was hdc is because that drive is the secondary master drive. I did not need to mount, really, hdc2. I only needed to mount hdc3 as it was where my files were located. But once I was successful with hdc2, I tried hdc1 with no success. I don't know if it was because it was the swap partition which was (i'm guessing) linked to the windows drive which no longer exists as windows. That scarcely matters since I have retrieved all of my files thanks to everyone's help, esp. ruudra.

This thread is done as far as I'm concerned.

"on to the next task....."

oh and also worzel68, thanks man.