what does a shadow drive look like?

[Nick Levinson]

Can I shadow a drive in Linux (ignoring risk to data for a moment)?

I want to diagnose a Windows 98SE tower by seeing if the same problem occurs with a Knoppix 4.0 live DVD bootup of the same hardware. To do that, I want to know what a shadow looks like in Knoppix (or Linux generally).

The problem, specifically: If I insert the flash thumb too early in bootup or before power up, a spurious drive is born as D:, pushing all other drives (except C:) one letter down. The flash thumb, which is now F:, and the spurious D: show the same folders and space. I do not drill down, afraid I'll harm data. I yank the flash, reboot, and reinsert the flash late enough. Then I can use it safely. I suspect the hardware is declaring something that Win (on both hard drive and floppy) misunderstands but that Knoppix/KDE is okay for. Knoppix shows my flash and hard drive. It shows, and lets me mount, hda1 and uba1. There is no hda2, uba2, hdb, or ubd, to my knowledge; I checked mount, mount -a, and /etc/fstab.

I don't have the problem with my Linux (Fedora) laptop or public Win2k/XP machines. I didn't have it on my old tower (now dismantled) that had the same Win98SE hard drive.

I already tried shadowing with Knoppix live but didn't see any duplicate or inexplicable drives or folders, but perhaps I wasn't looking for the right symptom, since the file system and filesystem are dfferent from Win's.

Any other Knoppix-based test you'd recommend?

Any major difference in how a shadow drive would show up in Knoppix?

Thanks.

--
Nick

[turbine]

I can see there being some sort of race condition such that if you insert the drive during bootup then some mishap occurs in the drive assignments. What throws me is that it happens whenever you insert the drive while the system is powered off. Have you checked the IRQ's and the address assignments in the drivers?

[Nick Levinson]

The only possible conflicts were in IRQs, and I put together a list of them and ran them by Scott Mueller in his forum. He says none of them would matter, and suggested trying BIOS defaults and flashing to upgrade BIOS. I might try the former but probably don't want to risk damaging the board by flashing.

Any idea what a shadow drive would look like in Knoppix or other Linux? I want to be sure my observation was correct.

Thanks.

--
Nick