Hard Drive insists on hdc not hda

Forum: HD Install
Topic: Hard Drive insists on hdc not hda
started by: gothelin

Posted by gothelin on July 28 2007,05:58

Problem Solved

I'm trying to get one of my laptops up and running without spending any further money on it. As it is, its CD-ROM drive is fried, so DSL's ability to install itself to the hard drive from a usb pen drive was a God-send for me!

However, DSL has decided that the hard drive's label is going to be hdc, not hda. I've never had that happen before. Is this going to cause me any major issues? And can I force DSL to recognise my hard drive as hda?

My other problem is partitioning - it just will not happen. I've tried using both cfdisk and fdisk. According to both, there is no hda - only hdc, which is my harddrive. Fair enough, I guess. It seems to run through the motions allowing me to set up a swap (set to 82, of course) labelled hdc1, a partition for DSL (set to 83 and made bootable) labelled hdc2, and another partition for data labelled hdc3. It even claims to have written the partition tables to the drive. However, it never actually does so. When I check to see what partitions I have, I still have one partition (hdc1) and it is still an ntfs partition. I've tried rebooting after partitioning, but it makes no difference.

Its driving me insane. Does anyone have any ideas on what I can do to fix these problems? I appreciate any help you can give me!

Posted by curaga on July 28 2007,06:46

First, there is absolutely no problem if it's not hda. Hdc just means it is in the second ide channel as master.

you could try deleting that ntfs partition using cfdisk (it shouldn't be mounted, as root, remember to press write and type yes when it asks)
and reboot after that.. It shouldn't be there after the reboot, but check first if it worked..

Posted by gothelin on July 28 2007,10:25

Thanks so much for your help, Curaga. Rebooting between deleting the ntfs partition and creating the new ones worked brilliantly!

Now I have a new problem!

I've got all my partitions sorted and DSL is now installed on my hdc2 partition. I can see that its on there when I mount the drive using the DSL on my USB drive.

However, it won't boot. I've installed the GRUB boot manager and all I get when the laptop boots from the hard drive is the word "GRUB" in the top left corner of the screen and nothing else. Is this a problem with the way the device map is set up? Because of my kooky hard drive, do I need to change it? Any advice would be great!

Thanks again.

Posted by curaga on July 28 2007,11:06

You should remove device.map (from /boot/grub and maybe /usr/lib/grub/i386-pc of the DSL partition, and also from your USB DSL)
and install grub manually.. 'cause if that file exists, grub doesn't probe drives, just assumes hd0=hda etc

installing grub manually:

Quote

sudo su
grub
root (hd0,1)
setup (hd0)
quit

Posted by gothelin on July 28 2007,14:50

Excellent. I'm glad I was on the right track. Your solution worked perfectly.

Thanks for all your help, Curaga.