Re: [tlug] Help: unrecognized disk

["David J Iannucci" <jlinux@example.com>]

On Mon, 26 Nov 2007 "Rainer Schuermann" said:
> On Sunday 25 November 2007 09:53:29 pm David J Iannucci wrote:
> > QParted doesn't see the partition types for some reason, although
> > cfdisk does.  Other than that, it certainly seems that the disk is
> > in a normal state, with a good partition table.
>
> I have had similar trouble with a hard disk I recycled from an old
> Windows laptop. What helped me:
>
> I not only re-partitioned the disk (using fdisk) but also explicitly
> formatted the new partitions immediately afterwards...

Thanks to everyone who responded.  I got it to work, and thought I
should summarize for you all what happened, because it's a bit weird:

1. At first, nothing can see the disk except Knoppix.

2. I decide to fiddle around in the BIOS.  There's nothing there I can
   see that looks like it would make a difference, but there's a setting
   to the effect of "show a warning if there's no HDD at boot time".  I
   turn this on.

3. Now, inexplicably, SUSE 10.1's install disc can also see the HDD, but
   Kubuntu 7.10 still can't.

4. I decide to fiddle around inside the machine and see how the drives
   are jumpered, because I know there are two of them in there ("What,
   you didn't tell us that before!" I hear you say :-).  Googling finds
   the jumper settings for the main drive (WDC), and the settings for
   the "slave" drive are stickered right on it.  The main drive seems
   to be set to something called "cable select" or something.  I don't
   know what this means so I change it to the one that means "I'm the
   only drive in this machine".  The situation gets worse after this (I
   think even Knoppix was at a loss), so I put it back to "cable
   select", but I also completely disconnect the slave drive.  It's
   not really needed.

5. Now it's working.  In the meantime I've got a copy of SUSE 10.3. SUSE
   and Knoppix can both see the drive as /dev/hda.  Now Kubuntu also
   sees it, but *GET THIS*, on Kubuntu it's /dev/sda.

The thing that's most mysterious about this is why an EIDE drive appears
as a SCSI drive on Kubuntu.  Is this just a "feature" of the Ubuntu
family, that they convert all disks internally to SCSI?

Dave