Hard drive access

Forum: User Feedback
Topic: Hard drive access
started by: chinar85

Posted by chinar85 on Nov. 22 2008,14:11

I'm running DSL 4.4.9 from a USB flash drive.
Install & net connection went fine (posting through it).
I'm just unable to locate any way to access my hard drives.

I'm a Linux newbie. I spent a whole day searching the system (through GUI, mainly emelfm) and the DSL forums. Couldn't find quite what I wanted.
If there was an oversight on my part, in forums or some obvious solution in the GUI, please be forgiving and kind enough to direct me accordingly.

HDD Details:
NTFS partitioned 80GB(20gb*4) SATA under WindowsXP (I enabled sata during install via cheat code. During USB boot, declares detection of SATA)

Emelfm (Super user) response:
-> at /dev/hda(,b,c,d,e,f,g,h)0-16 & /dev/sda(,b,c,d)x & /dev/sde(,f,g)1-8 shows inactive & 0 bytes
->at /dev/hda(,b,c,d,e,f,g,h)17-20 & /dev/sde(,f,g)9-15 & /dev/sdhx shows active & 18 bytes, but on but on trying to access 'Permission denied'.

Terminal response as root:
[ / ] # mount h(s)da(b)x
mount : can't find h(s)da(b)x in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab

Posted by curaga on Nov. 22 2008,14:46

It is possible your SATA chipset is not supported in DSL (2.4 kernel). If you bring up the mount tool, and click through the devices, what are the available ones?

Posted by chinar85 on Nov. 22 2008,17:54

With mount tool all that I ever got is:
Floppy
Cdrom
sda1
sda2

Posted by The Lightning Stalker on Nov. 25 2008,19:50

I'm having this same problem. It appears the nVidia nForce drivers aren't included. I found the sources, but where is the build tree?

Thank you

Posted by curaga on Nov. 25 2008,20:54

The build tree? Do you mean the .config file for the kernel? It, along with the Knoppix patches, is in kernelsource-2.4.31.dsl in testing. You might want to use the latest 2.4 kernel, since it likely has more SATA drivers available than 2.4.31.

Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on Nov. 26 2008,04:43

afaik some (older?) nforce support is included: see sata_nv

Posted by chinar85 on Dec. 10 2008,18:28

Now I am trying to add hard drive lines in fstab.
But the changes just won't persist through a reboot.
How do I make them persist.
And will this result in mount points getting created for the hard drives every time I boot.
I don't even know which device corresponds to my hard drive, in the rare event that dsl is detecting it at all. If it is, I am just guessing it to be hda17,18,19,20 since they show some content (17bytes in emelfm) as against most other devices showing 0 bytes.

Please tell me if my struggles are in the right directions.
I really appreciate curaga's suggestion to wait till a more sata-aware dsl comes along, but it's all so uncertain. What if it never happens or my problem persists even after. I can't wait to get fully operational in dsl.
I really like dsl for it's speed and particular style of minimalism. But without all the data on my hard drives my machine makes no sense, and am thus forced to stay with bloatware. Please help.