Hello everyone,
I have a seagate disk that i can't access from a linux pc.
if i plug this drive into a windows xp machine the drive is identified - no problem.

in linux, the disk gets a file descriptor (/dev/sdg) but if i run fdisk:
cfdisk as well (i'm on a slack11 machine but the same happens in another slack13.37 machine.
I can't mount it and in general i can't do anything with the drive.
I repeat, i just plug the drive in windows and voila... hmmmm
-i updated the firmware of the drive,
-i have tried plugging in the drive in other port of the available m/b sata ports (different sata chip actually, not the southbridge)

no luck,
i am using a 2.6.28.6 kernel ..
here is some dump from dmesg:

it clearyl can't read from the driver... but WHY?

thank you for your help
nass

it looks like your disk could be failing, you could try using hdparm to read the SMART info but you'll probabably have more luck downloading the Seagate drive diagnostics cd.

Boot from the CD, run the quick test, then run the long test and throughly check the drive for errors.

crap, lately the disk doesn't even appear in the BIOS boot..
its impossible to even test if i can access the disk with hdparm (even though I probably can't).

what's more i have tried in the past smartctl -a on the device and it told me that smart was disabled... enabling it with -S on didn't really help though..

i wonder if its some $hit from seagate...

if i managed to access the drive i'll let you know
thank you

i had similar problems/symptoms on two computers and as it turned out it wasn't the hard drive(s) at all. 't was the mainboard. once I changed the mainboard on both these computers, all was well.

I went through the game of unplugging the sata cable from the hdd, and let it sit and then plug it back in (sometimes with a different sata cable, cause i thought it might be a bad sata cable) and it would re-appear in the bios, but then the next day same problem again.

Looks like a failing HDD to me, backup your data.

data have already been backed up long time ago,
i'm just tring to squeeze a few more GB's for random disks that are laying around, useless otherwise...

Had this brand new drive, that could not be mounted on a Linux system.
Would not be recognized by the BIOS.
Fooled around with the help lines and got no where.
The instant they heard that I was using Linux, it was Linux to blame, and they do not support Linux. But I took it back to the store and got a replacement, and noticed something. The new drive of the same model (which worked) had a change to the SATA connectors, and a new version of firmware.
Some of the old SATA drives are not compatible with some manufacture's SATA chips, and some undocumented tweaking of the drives was being done.