Hard drive gone missing

JOsterheim · 09-21-2007, 06:05 AM

I have Mint on 2 machines. I have 2 hard drives in each machine. Mint sees them both in machine 1, but only one of the drives in machine 2. I had the same version of Mint on #2 a couple of months back and it saw both hard drives then; took Mint off to try Scientific Linux, then put Mint back on last week and no 2nd hard drive. The drive is fine and has Ubuntu loaded on it and by setting it as master it will run fine. Set to slave and it shows in the BIOS but not in Mint anymore. Suggestions???

Simon Bridge · 09-21-2007, 06:45 AM

What makes you think mint cannot "see" it?

From the terminal (in mint) enter fdisk -l

JOsterheim · 09-22-2007, 12:02 AM

It comes back unable to open /dev/hdb

bigrigdriver · 09-22-2007, 12:09 AM

Are you setting the master/slave thing via BIOS only, or are you also setting the jumpers on the drive to master/slave?

Simon Bridge · 09-22-2007, 09:34 PM

Quote:

It comes back unable to open /dev/hdb

What does? Copy out the command and the entire reply.

When this is the result of fdisk -l it normally means the drive cables aren't plugged in quite right. But in your case it sounds an awful lot like the drive is just jumpered to primary master. You know, you don't need to re-designate the drive to get a different one to boot... you can set it in grub.

JOsterheim · 09-24-2007, 10:03 PM

Well, it seems as though the drive died. I tried it on two other 'puters also to no avail. The BIOS did not recognise it in any of the instances - but had a few days prior. That would explain a lot.

I do have another question. I've never had the need to use a second hard drive with Linux until now. Most all distros except for Mint and SUSE (that I've tried) do not show the second hard drive in Computer (or My Computer) - including Ubuntu - and to my understanding, the second hard drive should be automatically mounted in Ubuntu and be listed in Computer as are floppy, CD (or DVD) and filesystem.

How do I make Computer show the second hard drive?

Simon Bridge · 09-25-2007, 01:38 AM

Additional drives are not usually mounted at boot. They need to be added to /etc/fstab. Ubuntu has been known to configure this automagically - but I've personally only seen this when running live. It's not something you really want it to do without asking you.

It will give you an icon in places though.