Well, my SATA drive experiments have been successful up to this point.

I installed a SATA 3Ware controller card, and a Seagate 320 gigabyte drive, set up all the partitions. I did this in Windows.

In Linux I used modconf to enable the 3Ware 3w-xxxx driver. At that point the system recognizes the many partitions on the drive when I do fdisk -l.

As you can see:

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 1020 8193118+ b W95 FAT32
/dev/sda2 1021 37312 291515490 f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda3 37313 38913 12860032+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda5 1021 7975 55866006 b W95 FAT32
/dev/sda6 7976 14290 50725206 b W95 FAT32
/dev/sda7 14291 20316 48403813+ b W95 FAT32
/dev/sda8 20317 26634 50749303+ b W95 FAT32
/dev/sda9 26635 32949 50725206 b W95 FAT32
/dev/sda10 32950 33844 7189056 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda11 33845 37312 27856678+ b W95 FAT32

I have started to setup mount points but cant get the partition to mount. On /dev/sda1 for example, I get this message:

mount: special device /dev/sda1 does not exist

Of course, it's not a special device, it a hard drive. What's THAT about?

Is there a different format for fstab entries for SATA?

Note, I am not trying to boot from the SATA drive. I am only trying to mount it's partitions and access it.

SakiZ