Hard Disk Not Recognised

[cjheeney]

I boot from Knoppix, everything comes up fine.
As it's booting, the system correctly spots my 1) hard drive, 2) DVD and 3) CDRW
reporting the manufacturer names and details etc.

When I get to the desktop, I have no HD* icon.
I try a simple manual mount and nothing.

Could it be because the hard-drive has no partitions? It's only a 13Gb drive that
(quite happily) runs Win98.

[Also, when I get to the desktop the CDRW drive cannot be configured for K3B.]

Any suggestions on how to sort the hard-drive without partitioning?

Thanks

[OErjan]

could you post output from the comands below please, it will help me help you.

dmesg|grep ATA

dmesg|grep hd

dmesg|grep CD

fdisk -l

cat /etc/fstab

dmesg|grep mount

mount

[cjheeney]

OErjan,

I actually managed to get it going. What I did was boot from my
MandrakeMove CD. I have used it before but had forgotten that it
correctly spotted the Windows partition.

I copied the /etc/fstab file to a USB key and then rebooted with Knoppix

When it came up, the entry for the hd in /etc/fstab (knoppix) was something
like

/dev/hda /mnt/hda auto noauto,user ...... (sorry, can't remember the rest)

So I tried two things:

1) Added the line (from MandrakeMove) to the /etc/fstab in knoppix:

/dev/hda1 /mnt/win_c vfat iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,umask=0,0,0

That worked! Happy days. Then I thought I should be able to do it from the prompt and so...

2) I used this line on the prompt (having first deleted the entry I used in /etc/fstab

mount -t vfat -o codepage=850,umask=0,0,0 /dev/hda1 /mnt/win_c

That also worked. Hurray. My faith in Linux is restored.

Now my question becomes why is it that MandrakeMove can spot the config correctly,
but Knoppix can't - especially given that it's supposed to be so good at hardware.

Finally, the CD-Burner seemed to sort itself out in Knoppix. And even if it doesn't, I
can still use the line from the /etc/fstab of MandrakeMove, which did work.
(Just out of interest, Knoppix and Mandrake lists the CD drives as hdc (dvd-rom) and hdd (cd-rw).

I will try to post the results which you asked for - maybe this is something that can be sorted
for future releases.

PS - I even tried booting to both the 2.4.x and the 2.6.y kernels with the same result, although
it made a difference with the USB key: 2.4 used /dev/sda1, 2.6 used /dev/usb1 (or some such)

Cheers,
Conor.

[cjheeney]

OK, Further details on this problem.

I got the Knoppix Hacks book today, which comes with knoppix 3.4 on disk.

I Fired it up and hey presto it recognised the hard disk correctly, as well as the CDRW.

Seems like maybe there's a bug in the 3.7 release or something has crept in since
3.4

I will test it on my laptop at work to see what happens and post the results.