Quote Originally Posted by Curulin
As to 1. you misunderstood me.
On my Knoppix desktop I have several devices named hda1, hda2, hda3, hdb, etc.
Mounting and opening them shows me their contents, one is my hard disk, one is my dvd player, etc.
2 of them have no contents, so I'm not sure if one of them is my new Maxtor hard disk or not.
I'm still misunderstanding. Do you really have a desktop icon for hdb, rather than a desktop icon for hdb1?
None of the icons should be for your hard disk. They should be for partitions on your hard disk. While you could have hda1, hda2 and hda3, this would be extremely unlikely for a Windows system; the partitions for your windows disk would have most likely been hda1, hda5, hda6 and maybe more beyond hda6. all hda prtitions are partitions on the same hard drive. hda1 is the first physical partition. But Winwows generally adds extra partitions as logical drives inside an extended partition, and these would show up as hda5, hda6 and so on, not hda2 or hda3. If you really have hda2 and hda3 then a lot more info is needed. One reason that you might have an hda2 is some OEM who hid a "recovery volume" on your hard disk (a dirty trick that wasts a lot of valuable disk space rather than having the OEM supply a 5 cent DVD of the recovery files instead). But I can't account for why you would have a hda2 and a hda3 on a pure Windows system (fine for Linux or systems with multiple OSs on them, but very strange for windows). hdb should be the second IDE drive, but it should not show up as a desktop icon; only partitions on it should show up, if it is partitioned at all, and these should be hdb1 and perhaps other hdbx numbers. If hdb is showing up it would be something I have no experience with.

Thanks for changing the subject line, but I was expecting something more specific, like "help in IDing Linux partitions" or "help in partitioning and formating" rather than a generic vegue reference to hardware. The better your subject line the better your chance of getting good feedback.

Cold boot your system and go into the BIOS (often by hitting del at boot time, but different for a few OEMs who insist on making this harder to find, see your computer manual if del doesn't work). What does the BIOS tell you about the hard drives? It will just give hard drive info, not partition info.

What flavor of Windows are you running? Telling you how to do things in windows depends on the version; they changed a lot between 98 and xp.