Mysterious invisible hard drive

Pearl Louis pearl.louis at anu.edu.au
Tue May 21 04:32:08 EST 2002


I think that the jumpers are set correctly because if I plug it in,
during the boot up sequence Mandrake detects the new hard drive as hdg
and the CD writer daisy chained to it as hdh.  That is it is detecting
the hard-drive as the master on the third IDE channel and the CD writer
as the slave on that channel.  The only problem is, during the boot-up
of Mandrake is the only time anything seems to detect the hard drive or
not hang whilst trying to detect it...

One further thing, I think we can rule out damage to the IDE cable or
the port because the CD writer attached to the same cable and port is
working fine.


On Tue, 2002-05-21 at 03:37, Andreas Bauer wrote:
> > I'm having (another) weird problem.  I recently got a hand on a used
> > 10Gig Hard-disk which has a win98 installation on it.  OK, so I plug it
> > in.  During the start-up messages to Mandrake Linux it detects it as hdg
> > so I know it's plugged in.  However *nothing* can seem to detect this
> > hard-drive.  Bios - zilch.  I have a dual boot system.  I boot into
> > Windows and it can't see it (in fact Windows won't even boot with it
> > plugged in).  I use a Windows boot disk and the boot disk hangs. 
> > Mandrake's disk partitioning tools can't see hdg.  I tried booting using
> > the Mandrake installation CD to use the partitioning tool during the
> > installation and then just exit out of the installation.  The result:
> > the install CD hangs while booting up trying to detect this hdg disk. 
> > And I know this disk is not broken because I saw the machine it was
> > orginally in boot up to Windows 5 minutes before I removed the disk and
> > put it in my machine. 
> 
> Not really a Linux related question, but anyway:  my humble assumption
> is that you have not set the Jumpers on the back of your disk correctly.
> Make sure one is a Master, the other a Slave (or adjust to Cable-Select,
> if you must).
> 
> -- 
> (o_  Andreas Bauer, baueran at in.tum.de, http://home.in.tum.de/baueran/
> //\  "One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief
> V_/_  that one's work is terribly important." -- Bertrand Russell






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