SEO

Hi guys,

I have a problem with my linux install that is driving me up the wall,
please help! The problem lies with my hard disks and partitions.

Brief Machine spec:

AMD Athlon 1800+ XP
640MB RAM
40GB IDE HDD (Connected to primary IDE port on MoBo)
40GB SCSI HDD (Connected to Hewlett Packard RAID card)
Dual Boot SuSE 9.1 Pro / Win XP Pro
KDE 3.3.3

I originally had the following partitions:

SCSI Disk
---------
Windows XP (C:\ Drive) - NTFS
Shared Data - NTFS

IDE Disk
--------
SuSE Swap - Swap
SuSE / - Reiser

Everything was running great until I decided to reformat the Shared
Data partition to use FAT32 so that data could be more reliably shared
between SuSE and Windows.

I formatted the partition as FAT32 using Windows but when I booted to
SuSE the partition is no longer available. Not only is the partition
not available but it would appear the Linux no longer sees the whole
SCSI HDD.

If I try mounting the drive using mount /dev/sdax /mnt I recieve an
error:

mount: /dev/sdax is not a valid block device.

The output of fdisk -l only shows the IDE HDD (hda). I'm at work at
the moment so I can't actually post the output.

I know that the SCSI is connected properly and working fine as Windows
boots from this drive and Windows can see all the partitions no probs.
Also, if I run the SuSE install program (from the boot CD) the
partitioning recommended by YaST includes the SCSI drive with all its
partitions so I'm convinced this isn't a hardware fault.

My question is why could Linux have lost sight of the SCSI drive and
why does the SuSE install program see it without any problems? How can
I get it back? All help is very much appreciated.

Please note that although I am a Windows administrator I am relatively
new to Linux.

Thanks in advance,
Dave.

On 2004-09-29, L-Plates <lplates@ukonline.co.uk> wrote:
> I formatted the partition as FAT32 using Windows but when I booted to
> SuSE the partition is no longer available. Not only is the partition
> not available but it would appear the Linux no longer sees the whole
> SCSI HDD.

dmesg | grep sd will tell you if Linux can see or not the disk and if he
found problems on it.

fdisk -l /dev/sda will show you the partition table of the disk.

Davide

--
Q: Why did Bill Gates cross the road?
A: To avoid the Department of Justice.

Thanks for the response Davide. I'm afraid running the command you
mentioned returned nothing. I tried just calling dmesg and looking
through the dump for clues. The following is snippets of the dump that
apply to my hard disks:

Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision: 7.00alpha2
ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with
idebus=xx
VP_IDE: IDE controller at PCI slot 0000:00:11.1
VP_IDE: chipset revision 6
VP_IDE: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
VP_IDE: VIA vt8235 (rev 00) IDE UDMA133 controller on pci0000:00:11.1
ide0: BM-DMA at 0xe400-0xe407, BIOS settings: hdaMA, hdbio
ide1: BM-DMA at 0xe408-0xe40f, BIOS settings: hdcMA, hddMA
hda: MAXTOR 6L040J2, ATA DISK drive
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
hdc: LITEON DVD-ROM LTD-165H, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
hdd: PIONEER DVD-RW DVR-108, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
hda: max request size: 128KiB
hda: 78177792 sectors (40027 MB) w/1819KiB Cache, CHS=65535/16/63,
UDMA(33)
hda: cache flushes supported
hda: hda1 hda2 hda3 < hda5 >
ide-floppy driver 0.99.newide
[...]
SCSI subsystem initialized
megaraid_mm: 1.0.0.rc1 (Release Date: Mon May 17 18:55:02 EDT 2004)
megaraid: Ignoring new-style parameters in presence of obsolete ones
megaraid: 2.20.0.rc1 (Release Date: Mon May 17 18:55:02 EDT 2004)
scsi0 : Adaptec AIC7XXX EISA/VLB/PCI SCSI HBA DRIVER, Rev 6.2.36
<Adaptec 2902/04/10/15/20C/30C SCSI adapter>
aic7850: Single Channel A, SCSI Id=7, 3/253 SCBs

ReiserFS: hda2: found reiserfs format "3.6" with standard journal
ReiserFS: hda2: using ordered data mode
reiserfs: using flush barriers
ReiserFS: hda2: journal params: device hda2, size 8192, journal first
block 18,
max trans len 1024, max batch 900, max commit age 30, max trans age 30
ReiserFS: hda2: checking transaction log (hda2)
ReiserFS: hda2: Using r5 hash to sort names
VFS: Mounted root (reiserfs filesystem) readonly.
Trying to move old root to /initrd ... failed
Unmounting old root
Trying to free ramdisk memory ... okay
Freeing unused kernel memory: 216k freed
Adding 1052216k swap on /dev/hda1. Priority:42 extents:1
reiserfs: enabling write barrier flush mode
md: Autodetecting RAID arrays.
md: autorun ...
md: ... autorun DONE.
device-mapper: 4.1.0-ioctl (2003-12-10) initialised: dm@uk.sistina.com
subfs 0.9
[...]
hda: drive_cmd: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hda: drive_cmd: error=0x04 { DriveStatusError }

I'm afraid a lot of this means nothing to me but I don't seem to see
any errors directly relating to the SCSI hard drive. In fact, it seems
to find the RAID card but no devices attached to it.

None of this explains why the YaST setup still sees the drive and its
partitions without any problems.

Thanks again,
Dave

On 29 Sep 2004 04:11:02 -0700, lplates@ukonline.co.uk (L-Plates) wrote:

>Hi guys,
>
>I have a problem with my linux install that is driving me up the wall,
>please help! The problem lies with my hard disks and partitions.
>
>Brief Machine spec:
>
>AMD Athlon 1800+ XP
>640MB RAM
>40GB IDE HDD (Connected to primary IDE port on MoBo)
>40GB SCSI HDD (Connected to Hewlett Packard RAID card)
>Dual Boot SuSE 9.1 Pro / Win XP Pro
>KDE 3.3.3
>
>I originally had the following partitions:
>
>SCSI Disk
>---------
>Windows XP (C:\ Drive) - NTFS
>Shared Data - NTFS
>
>IDE Disk
>--------
>SuSE Swap - Swap
>SuSE / - Reiser
>
>Everything was running great until I decided to reformat the Shared
>Data partition to use FAT32 so that data could be more reliably shared
>between SuSE and Windows.
>
>I formatted the partition as FAT32 using Windows

You may want to update /etc/fstab to reflect the change in the FS-type from
ntfs to vfat. Use any text editor to do this.

It might also be advisable to update the FS-type in the partition table.
'fdisk' can do this with the 't' command, but, Windows may have done this for
you already.

--John

> You may want to update /etc/fstab to reflect the change in the FS-type from
> ntfs to vfat. Use any text editor to do this.

I tried this initially but it didn't help as Linux cannot see the
whole drive so the partition information is no use.

> It might also be advisable to update the FS-type in the partition table.
> 'fdisk' can do this with the 't' command, but, Windows may have done this for
> you already.

I'm quite sure Windows will have done this already as a fresh install
of SuSE recognises the drive and the FAT32 partition.

Can no-one explain why the SuSE install program (YaST) recognises the
drive no problem yet my installed version can't?

Thanks.
D.