I have a new laptop with two 100 gig SCSI disk drives. I am using Promise Non-RAID controller drivers for running Windows because I dont have the disks stripped or mirrored or anything like that. Right now I have Win XP SP2 loaded on the first disk (Disk 0) using 46.58 GB with NTFS. I also have 46.58 GB of unallocated space left on this drive to install linux. My 2nd drive (Disk 1) is not going to be used.

When I boot from the CD and get to the partitioning part, I type "fdisk /dev/sdc" I get a message that says "unable to open /dev/sdc". When I type "fdisk /dev/hda" I get a message that says "you will not be able to write the partition table". When I go to look at the partitioning table in fdisk, it shows no partitions. Shouldnt it alteast show the partition information where WinXP is installed?

I dont think Im loading the correct image file or something. I have tried loading "ataraid.i, sata.i, scsi.s, scsi2.s, and scsi3.s. All give me the same results.

Where can I get the right image file or drivers so I could proceed with the installation of Slackware without wiping out my first partition with Winxp on it?

My harddrive info is listed below:

Cheers,


Model: ST910021 A SCSI Disk Device
Size: 100GB
Total Heads: 255
Total Cylinders: 12161
Total Tracks: 3101055
Tracks Per Cylinder: 255

Looks like you have your syntax wrong.

The first physical IDE drive is hda second is hdb etc

The first SCSI disk is sda, and so on.

So: is NOT asking anything it knows about

Try That may help

Even better - try "fdisk -l" (ell, for list), and let the machine tell you what it can see.

I was just trying to point out the obvious errors in the OP code that he tried.

By all means, will definately get you going in the right direction

Thanks all for the advice. I tried fdisk /dev/sda and received the message "unable to open /dev/sda"
I also tried fdisk -l and it just goes back to the prompt.
Every image I tried keeps giving me the same message that it’s unable to open the drives, which I'm taking it as it's not seeing the drives at all. I was talking with someone today about this problem and they said sometimes Slackware is not compatible with drives like mine. I don’t know if this is true or not. I hope it’s not because I don’t really want to use anything else... Ive grown very attached to this distro. I never had any trouble installing Slackware before on IDE drives.

Any other ideas as to why this would be happening or has anyone installed Slack on drives like this?


Cheers

I found this while searching for a fix. Sounds like Fedora might be having the same problem as Im running into with Slackware:


"The hard drive uses a Promise SATA hard drive controller, the driver for which is, as of this writing (8 Feb 05), not yet in the Fedora kernel, not even as a loadable model. The driver exists only as a patch. An attempt to boot from a Fedora cd fails when the installer fails to find the hard drive.
One possibility would be to use the linux dd option of the Fedora boot disk to load a driver disk with the new modules on it. Unfortunately, the new modules must be created from a patched kernel, and the patched modules prove to be incompatible with the kernel and modules on the Fedora disk.

Another possibilty would be to create a new Fedora boot disk with all the relevant files on it. Unfortunately, if you do all of that and try to do a network install of Fedora, then the install fails because the md5sum of the boot disk fails to match that of the network installation.

So our electronics shop took the disk out of the laptop, and bunged it into a desktop with an old-fashioned disk cable. We loaded Fedora on to the disk, compiled a kernel patched with the new sata_promise driver, took the disk out of the desktop, put it back in the laptop, started it up and ... boot panic.

Conclusion: installing Fedora was, as of the first half of Feb 2005, a mathematical impossibility. Maybe for you it will be different: perhaps by the time you read this Fedora will have incorporated the patches into the kernel, and for you all will be plain sailing."


Maybe I should start looking at Gentoo until these drives are in the kernel or a patch is released.

You have 2 scsi drives with Promise scsi controller? Or 2 Sata disks with Promise sata controller with raid off? That scsi controller may not be supported by SW scsi drivers. My Promise sata controller with raid off was recognized by libranet debian,xandros but not SW.My Diamond scsi controller needed scsi2 for SW. Reading about what each scsi driver supports or what sata kernel driver supports will help. But success not guaranteed.Maybe someone with your lappy has linux installed. Good luck.