DOS Supports SATA

[digDug]

With a Win98 boot floppy (DOS 6.2) I can Fdisk, format, and Ghost the SATA drives in a Dell PowerEdge SC4300
With a Knoppix CD from 2004 - I can't see the drives at all. What is DOS doing that allows it to see the drives?

[OErjan]

that IS weird, as Sata was not used in 1998, it was not even fully developed.
could it be that it works with the disks as scsi?

[digDug]

CFDISK won't run properly until I guess the correct disk. Imagine if Midnight Commander insisted that you type the complete path for a directory before it would start up and show you the contents of that directory.

As it stands, the only way I can find fixed disks is to play "CFDISK Battleship"

digDug: "How about 'cfdisk /dev/sda'?"
Computer: "MISS"
digDug: "Well perhaps 'cfdisk /dev/hda'?"
Computer: "MISS"
digDug: "Well only 50 out of 52 combinations left..."

FDISK for DOS tells you if there are any fixed disks up front. It tells you how many fixed disks it has found and shows you the partition information on them all. But FDISK doesn't have the power that CFDISK does. And yet FDISK can see the drives and CFDISK cannot...

So I'm looking for that Linux utility that says "Here they are!" or more likely "I don't see any drives..."

[OErjan]

just a minuit here, fdisk -l , that is l = L not 1 (one) nor i in linux would tell you of any disks found aswell. that is
sudo fdisk -l
or
sudo cat /proc/partitions
there is even a graphical program called qtparted (not unlike partition magic) that will list all disks and poartitions... and let you resize, format...