[wellylug] (no subject)

[MDM Productions]

Jethro Carr wrote:

>On Fri, 2008-01-04 at 19:45 +1300, MDM Productions wrote:
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>>Thank you for your advice, Colin. Just a wee additional; stayed with 
>>FAT32 not NTFS in deference to (fear??) stuff left over from a 
>>progression of Window OS's. Puppy is quite happy to delve into 'D' drive 
>>but can't get his fangs into 'C' at all. I shall go a-Goooogling.
>>    
>>
>
>are both drives connected to the same hardware controller?
>
>I assume they are both IDE drives connected to the motherboard, but it
>always pays to check. :-)
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Gentlepeople,

"But wait....." Taking all/most of the proffered advice I think I am on 
to it. Yes, Jethro, both drives are IDE on the same controller. Tried an 
experimental install of Ubuntu 7.04 last night. _4 hours_ of beige 
screen and drive thrashing later I aborted. Flashed up Puppy and 
couldn't find any reference to hda1, which by the presence of an hdb1 
implied that the Pup at least had an idea there was an hda. Looked at 
Gpart(?) and found a drive hda1 with an unknown file system, which can't 
be mounted. Tried! Then the penny dropped.
First there was a Pentium1 with a dead drive. Obtained a brand-new 10Gb 
Western Digital drive but P1's don't recognise bigger than 2Gb. Aha! An 
Ontrack Drive Overlay! Just the thing. Life resumed. Along came the Dell 
box with a 10Gb Maxstor drive and 98SE. Which after 6 months at mine 
developed read errors and fell over. Meanwhile the P1 had produced a 
wicked crack sound on startup and smoke leaked out (capacitor probably) 
Oh dear. But the WD drive still worked and was transplanted, formatted, 
and poured full of XP after 5 hours of agonising piecemeal data salvage 
from the old drive. And guess what? The overlay is still firmly in place 
on that WD drive despite a couple of formats and I would wager my right 
one that it is the reason for the invisibility and unknown file system. 
And why a distro can't find anywhere to land. Obviously there is a big 
first step looming in this project....
I return to a comment I made some time ago in my first mail: I know just 
enough to get into trouble.
Thank you all for your indulgence in listening to this prattle,

John.