I tried to install SuSE Linux 10.2 to my second hard disk without any success.

My system: ABIT AL8-V motherboard, P4 (3000Hz) processor, 2GB DDR2 RAM and two hard disks, the first is a 200GB Seagate (SATA) and the second is a 120GB Maxtor (ATA).

SuSE Linux installations (10.0, 10.1) assign these disks as '/dev/sda' (SATA) and '/dev/sdb' (ATA). I installed Windows XP and a SuSE Linux to the first (SATA) hard disk and another SuSE Linux to the second hard disk. All of these systems worked well.

As with 10.2, the situation is quite different. During the ‘Loading of basic drivers’ I get an error message:

ABIT 82801GB/GR/GH (ICH7 Family) Serial ATA Storage Controller IDE drivers:
ata_piix, generic

ata_piix udev-event[1348]: wait_for_sysfs waiting for ‘/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1f.2/host1/target1:0:0/1:0:0:0/ioerr_cnt’ failed

After some minutes of waiting the driver loading goes on, and the graphical window of Yast appears. Then I get another error message:

The partitioning on disk /dev/sdb is not readable by the partitioning tool parted, which is used to change the partition table.
You can use the partitions on disk /dev/sdb ay they are. You can format them and assign mount points to them, but you cannot add, edit, resize or remove partitions from that disk with this tool.

After Yast analyzes system I can see none of the partitions on ‘/dev/sdb’ that I have created before. Yast thinks that there are no partitions on /dev/sdb at all.

I can delete partition table and create partitions (sdb1, sdb2, sdb3) on ‘/dev/sdb’ by Yast. Then I can apparently install system onto them, but this system is not bootable, the problem is ‘ata_piix’ again, the error message is something like ‘partition /dev/sdbx cannot be found’.

How can I install SuSE Linux 10.2 to my second (ATA) hard disk?

Best wishes
Tibor Gruber
Budapest,
Hungary

Is the second drive a PATA drive? If so, it's name should be /dev/hda or something similar. Make sure you didn't select an external usb drive by mistake. SuSE uses grub, which uses a different notation, (hd0,0) or (hd1,0) for the first partition on two drives for example. This notation doesn't distinquish between PATA and SATA drives.

Also check in bios that both drives are visible.

If you press [CTRL-ALT-F2] when the YaST installer reaches the formatting stage, you can enter the shell and use the "fdisk -l" command to see what that says you have.

Also, if you have changed the partitioning at all, be sure to power cycle the computer so that the bios picks up the changes. If you simply warm booted to boot up the install disk, that may not be enough and may confuse the bios.

I have had a similar problem once, and this is my suggestion for repairing the problem.

1) Boot the existing SuSE on sda.

2) Make certain that there are not mounted partitions on /dev/sdb. That means: umount /dev/sdb1, umount /dev/sdb2, etc. until you are sure all partitions on /dev/sdb are not mounted.

3) Run 'cfdisk /dev/sdb'. Delete all partitions, select 'write' to write the new partition table, then select 'quit'.

4) Reboot. That will load the new partition table into the running system, and show /dev/sdb as free space.

5) Run 'cfdisk /dev/sdb' again, and make new partitions. For the partition that will hold / (the root of the filesystem), be careful to select the 'bootable' option. After making all partition, select 'write' to write the new pattition table, then 'quit'.

6) Put the SuSE installation cd in the drive, and re-boot.

Now, SuSE should see the partitions on /dev/sdb.

During installation, you can choose the filesystem type for each partition, and select to format before installation.

How can you tell what version of SUSE 10 you have installed?

I have a SuSE 10.1 on my first hard drive (/dev/sda) and recently I tried to install 10.2 on /dev/sdb.