[wellylug] (no subject)

Brent Wood pcreso at pcreso.com
Sat Jan 5 08:47:17 NZDT 2008


--- MDM Productions <thefrasers at clear.net.nz> wrote:

> 
> 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. 

Not necessarily, the primary slave will be hdb, irrespective of whether primary
master (hda) exists or not. sd<a...> drives are generally SCSI or SATA drives.
Although I have seen Fedora call a PATA (IDE) drive sda. 

> Western Digital drive but P1's don't recognise bigger than 2Gb. Aha! An 
> Ontrack Drive Overlay! Just the thing. Life resumed. 

Sounds right. Formatting just affects the partition, which is an OnTrack
partition. You need to remove the partition & disk boot sector/mbr & create a
Linux compatible partition there instead.

As Linux sees no mountable partitions on the disk hda, neither will you, all
you normally see are partitions (hda1, hda2, etc), not actual disks. The drive
itself should still be there, however. Try typing "more /proc/diskstats". There
should be lines referencing hda, hdb & hdb1 (as well as any other
disks/partitions attached), but no hda1.

Running Puppy or Ubuntu, try cfdisk or parted or fdisk, whichever it comes
with. That _should_ let you remove the unrecogniseable partition & create a new
Linux partition instead. Note that any data in the old Ontrack partition will
be gone forever.


HTH,

   Brent Wood




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