Serial ATA Seagate 200gb BIG TROUBLES
 

Hi! I've recently bought a S-ATA Seagate Barracuda 200gb's. But I stepped over some problems.

First off, In dmesg I get:
SCSI device sda: 390721968 512-byte hdwr sectors (200050 MB)
SCSI device sda: drive cache: write back
sda: unknown partition table
Attached scsi disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0

So, I try cfdisk /dev/sda <- device not found. Hmm, I check yast hardware info, it says that it uses /dev/sda as devicename. Strange. I try the yast partitioner, it only detects my hda and hdb.

I reboot, using the install disc, select repair install, expert, partioner. Yay! It detects! I set mode to ext3, format, reboot... I still can't find the partition! cfdisk shows nothing, and i can't mount /dev/sda1 (which is where i partitioned it) sad.gif

Help is APPRECIATED!

First - a useful tip is that the kernel logs all the partitions in /proc/partitions - so cat /proc/partitions to see what is available.

Interesting that it works from the recovery CD. Can you boot to a recovery disc commant line and do 'cat /proc/paritions' and check it all looks fine.

I would then start to suspect a kernel quirk. What kernel are you running? (type uname -r) What kernel is on the recovery CD?

Another thing - what happens if you type 'file -sL /dev/sda' - that should tell you if there is a problem reading the raw device.

Sorry for waffle, but as you say it is a rather bizarre problem and nothing obvious springs to mind.

TIM

# file -sL /dev/sda
/dev/sda: cannot open (/dev/sda)

# cat /proc/partitions
major minor #blocks name

3 0 40146624 hda
3 1 1052226 hda1
3 2 39094177 hda2
3 64 199148544 hdb
3 65 199125643 hdb1
8 0 195360984 sda
8 1 195342336 sda1


# uname -r
2.6.8-24.11-default




Don't have the time to reboot on recovery cd now, but my partition shows in proc/partitions, stange? :/

So, what do you think?

Try using fdisk instead of cfdisk. I like cfdisk better, but I've had problems with it in the past on large hard drives. If you can access the drives with fdisk, then see if there is an updated version of cfdisk install it, and try cfdisk again.

# fdisk /dev/sda

Unable to open /dev/sda



When I usewd the rescue DVD again to fix my fstab file, it detected the partition and added it in the fstab file, but it still doesn't work :(

I degraded the kernel to the default on the DVD (same as the rescue DVD), still no go :(

No idea anyone?

Hi,

Me again. Are you still struggling with this? I think possibly it is simply a question that /dev/sda is pointing in the wrong place. The potted summary of the files in /dev is as follows - traditionally these would be be actual files stored on the disk. They would be of type 'block special', meaning that they were like a link to an abstraction of a physical device. The device is identified by a major and minor number - so for example the main IDE drive in my machine here (/dev/hda) has major number 3, minor 0. I can make a file anywhere on my system (eg in /tmp) using the command:

mknod /tmp/foo b 3 0

then 'fdisk -l /tmp/foo' will list the partition table as expected. To access the individual partitions I make more block special files, giving the partition number as the minor number. As you have probably twigged, these are the numbers shown in the output of /proc/partitions. Therefore get a root shell and try:

mknod foo b 8 0
fdisk -l foo
(when you are done simply rm the special file)

If that works then your /dev/partition is screwed. You don't say what distro you use - the modern ones use a think called devfs (or udev) to keep all the device names pointed in the right place by creating them in memory rather than on the disk, but maybe you are using an old distro, or you you haven't mounted devfs, or some other reason. The first question is where is /dev/sda actually pointing? Is it a symlink or an actual file, and what is it, or the link target, pointing at? The commands 'ls -l' and 'file' will be able to tell you about symlinks and block-special files respectively.

Keep trying!

TIM