sdb or hdb???
 

In the middle of installing slackware12 been a while since i have install os... I have 2 sata100 hdds C: windows and D: slackware12 both Master Primary Drives. My motherboard is 100fsb but with HTP366 ata66

So how do I label slackware partitions?
hdb or hdc?
sdb or sdc?
I have no secondary slave hdds on either ide3 or ide4 channels only a master on each.

ide 1 and ide2 are occupied by cdrom master and cdwr master.
Thanks

Your first SATA disk will be sda and your second will be sdb.

mega thanks for quick response... as i try to fdisk, I am unable to fdisk /dev/sdb
because it seems I labled this hard drive hdg??? Don't know how...
How do I change dev/hdg to dev/sdb?

You don't, hd and sd use different drivers. Messing with these things will only bring you headaches. One things that may make a difference is the way that your disks are configures in BIOS: IDE or AHCI. But 2.6.20+ kernels should use sd for both.

Well the thing is that when I installed slackware10 and fdisked only, / and swap partition I somehow thought: ide 1 i= a&b master/slave, ide2 = c&d master slave, ide3= e&f master/slave and the ide4= g&h master/slave this hierarchy left me w /hde for windows and /hdg for linux :( Now was trying to delete the entire hdd and create a clean slackware12 install.

Had to halt the new install process because I am having trouble figuring out how to allocate 160gb for swap, /, /home, /usr.

Do a "/sbin/fdisk -l" and see what the machine thinks the disks are called. Might need root as well, depending on how Pat set things up.

syg00, tried your code and got back "Not found"...so I am trying 'dd if =/de/zero of=/dev/hdg" to see if I can cleanup everything. How long does this take with 160GB? If this doesn't work I will try "dd if=/dev/urandom>fileconsumingall freespace" When dd says none left do "rm"... this process is supose to leave my new hdd like new! If all this fails then the next question is how to partition 160gb... Maybe by the time I am 60 years old this project will be completed?

You need to be root to do fdisk -l.

Also I don't see how zeroing your disk is going to change hd to sd. The hd/sd depends on the kernel version and the third letter is determined by the way your hardware is configured.

Ok, well this is an attempt a fresh install of slackware12 w/default kernel.. prviously installed on hdd was slackware10. Will see. If I want to stop the dd if= /dev/zero process how do I stop it? Thanks

Can't you just use Ctrl-C?

Highpoint controllers that uses the hpt366 module will use IDE device nodes even though some controllers contains SATA connectors.

For a secondary IDE controller, the device nodes will be hde (Primary Master), hdf (Primary Slave), hdg (Secondary Master), hdh (Secondary Slave).

You do not have SATA controllers. You have regular IDE controllers.

Slackware will not load the secondary controller, so you have to manually load it. The module for Highpoint controllers 366 to 374 is hpt366. If you are installing Linux on a hard drive connected to this controller, you will have to make sure initrd file contains this module or else Linux will not boot. Use the mkinitrd utility to help you create an initrd with the require module.

I recommend use cfdisk to create and delete partitions. Linux partitions are type 83 and Linux swap partitions are 82. After writing the partition table to the proper hard drive, run hdparm -z [device_node] to re-scan the partition table on the desire drive. During formatting do not select the extended partition.

Zeroing is useless on a home computer. You are just creating more work and wasting time.

Install is in process
 

Thanks, especially for the information on HPT366 I would have been going crazy trying to figure out what was wrong if I couldn't boot Slackware...
Electro, previous Slackware10 had HPT366 in its kernals... What are the cons of rolling my install to a previously working version?