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Re: hard drive not found



A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far way, someone said...

> I have a Gateway PC with a PIII 450 and a 9GB western digital hard
> drive.  When I boot up with my Debian cd, my hard drive is not found.

Ok.  Do you happen to know what hard drive you have?  I would not be
surprised if your problem is because the Debian boot floppy is based on an
ancient kernel.  Have you tried a boot floppy from a more recently
released distribution (like RedHat or SuSE)?

Also a tip: this is how IDE drives are mapped under Linux:

/dev/hda - the master drive on the primary controller
/dev/hdb - the slave drive on the primary controller
/dev/hdc - the master drive on the secondary controller
/dev/hdd - the slave drive on the secondary controller

If you see /dev/hdax (where x is a number), then that means "partition x
on drive /dev/hda".  On most PCs today, /dev/hda is the hard drive, and
either /dev/hdc or /dev/hdd is the CD drive.

> I see in the install documentation that IDE-SCSI drives are not
> supported.

I don't think that's your problem.  IDE-SCSI is used with IDE CD writers
so that they'll work properly under Linux, and little else.

This is from the documentation for the IDE-SCSI driver:

This will provide SCSI host adapter emulation for IDE ATAPI devices, and
will allow you to use a SCSI device driver instead of a native ATAPI
driver.

This is useful if you have an ATAPI device for which no native driver has
been written (for example, an ATAPI PD-CD or CDR drive); you can then use
this emulation together with an appropriate SCSI device driver. In order
to do this, say Y here and to "SCSI support" and "SCSI generic support",
below.

Note that this option does NOT allow you to attach SCSI devices to a box
that doesn't have a SCSI host adapter installed.

If both this SCSI emulation and native ATAPI support are compiled into the
kernel, the native support will be used.

> How do I know if this is what I have?  This is the first time I've
> attempted to install an operating system of any kind, so be gentle.

-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Phil Brutsche					pbrutsch@creighton.edu

"There are two things that are infinite; Human stupidity and the
universe. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein


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