Dell WinXP hard drive not shown in Knoppix 3.8

[NeilBlanchard]

Greetings,

I've booted Knoppix 3.8 for the first time on a Dell WinXP machine, and I cannot "see" the C: drive. On my home machines (I built 'em), this has always worked -- is theresomething I can do to get the C: drive to show up?

TIA

Neil Blanchard

[UnderScore]

Use the command dmesg to get device info from the kernel messages and send that through a filter called grep:
dmesg | grep -i ide
dmesg | grep -i hd

This is the output of those commands on my machine:

-bash-2.05b# dmesg | grep -i ide
BIOS-provided physical RAM map:
Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision: 7.00beta4-2.4
ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
PIIX4: IDE controller at PCI slot 00:07.1
    ide0: BM-DMA at 0x1060-0x1067, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:DMA
    ide1: BM-DMA at 0x1068-0x106f, BIOS settings: hdc:DMA, hdd:pio
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
hda: attached ide-disk driver.
hdb: attached ide-disk driver.
ide-floppy driver 0.99.newide
ide-floppy driver 0.99.newide
EXT3-fs: ide0(3,1): orphan cleanup on readonly fs
EXT3-fs: ide0(3,1): 9 orphan inodes deleted
EXT3 FS 2.4-0.9.19, 19 August 2002 on ide0(3,1), internal journal
EXT3 FS 2.4-0.9.19, 19 August 2002 on ide0(3,65), internal journal

-bash-2.05b# dmesg | grep -i hd
    ide0: BM-DMA at 0x1060-0x1067, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:DMA
    ide1: BM-DMA at 0x1068-0x106f, BIOS settings: hdc:DMA, hdd:pio
hda: Maxtor 83201D6, ATA DISK drive
hdb: WDC AC22500L, ATA DISK drive
hdc: MATSHITA CR-5850, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
hda: attached ide-disk driver.
hda: host protected area => 1
hda: 6267744 sectors (3209 MB) w/256KiB Cache, CHS=777/128/63, UDMA(33)
hdb: attached ide-disk driver.
hdb: task_no_data_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hdb: task_no_data_intr: error=0x04 { DriveStatusError }
hdb: 4999680 sectors (2560 MB) w/256KiB Cache, CHS=620/128/63, DMA
 hda: hda1 hda3
 hdb: hdb1
-bash-2.05b#

The important data is the hd?? such as hda or hdb1.
In my system:
hda is a hard drive on the master IDE drive on the Primary IDE controller channel
hdb is a hard drive on the slave IDE drive on the Primary IDE controller channel
hdc is a CDROM drive on the master IDE drive on the Secondary IDE controller channel

hda1 is the root / of the system.
hda3 is the swap partition
hdb1 is a /home partition for user data

On your PC /dev/hda1 should be the C: drive.

[NeilBlanchard]

Greetings,

After I posted, and rebooted Knoppix, it worked! The thing is, Dell has a three partitions, and the one that is the C: drive is hda2, actually. The other two contain Dell's hidden files, I guess.

The problem was, I did not mount the hda2 or hda3 (from the desktop shortcuts) before I fired up k3b, so they appeared empty. I am actually going to be demonstrating Knoppix this evening, at a DataCAD user group meeting. I has been a very powerful tool for recovering files from Windows computers that have a Trojan, or other boot problems: burn the files to CD/DVD and then copy them onto the new HD.

I'm also going to be showing the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows (which is actually Linux with some WinXP tools "slipstreamed" in, I think), that can do similar things; plus UBCDfW can edit/reset Windows passwords -- and it can write/erase the Trojans from the NTFS hard drives! It is a bit more involved process -- you have to "build" the ISO, and you have to own a WinXP CD-ROM, too.

Thanks anyway!

Neil Blanchard