Hi all, first post here as it seems you all seem to know Linus as well or better than most of the other forums i've been to.
Anyway, here's my problem. I've got a brand spanking new system over here and I have the Asus A8N-E board. generally is seems to run fantasticlly however there seems to be a problem with seeing ANY drive on it that's not a master. XP doesn't seem to have any problems seeing both the masters and slaves, but not Linux. Neither fdisk or cfdisk picks them up and it doesnt seem to be Linux OS specific as I tried Slackware 10.1, Slackware 10.2, Mandriva, and Fedora Core without any luck.
If I were just dinking around with Linux on a spare pc it wouldnt be an issue. However I planned on using it as a dual boot XP/Slackware system with each one on a separate drive.
I dont knw if this is a known board problem or if it's a problem with Linux in specific. So, in short, has anybody had any similar issues with this board or better yet how to resolve them?
Regards and thanks in advance for any help you can offer.
Hi,
How are you checking if the drives are being seen or not? Could it be that they are seen but not mounted? Another alternative would be that the module is not being loaded.
Can you post the results for the following commands?
lspcidmesg | grep /dev/lsmod
My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive.
Basically here's what I've got...
On the primary IDE:
120gb master = windows xp
80gb slave = empty
secondary IDE:
Secondary master = NEC cdr
secondary slave = NEC dvd/rw
Inserted install cd into the drive, loads ramdisk blah blah blah....then at the command prompt I type cfdisk and the only drive that it reports is the 120gb master. If I put the install cd into the slave cdr it doesnt recognize the disk and throws the flag at boot "no os present, please reboot" or something along those lines.
It also doesnt matter what the position is on the ribbon or how I've got jumpers set; master, slave, cable select. The only ones it sees are the ones set for master. So it appears as far as the system is concerned it doesn't exist. What I've got to do is to physically remove the windows drive and switch the linux drive to primary master.
For the command outputs you suggested I run here's the outputs:
Code:lspci yields: 00:00.0 Memory controller: nVidia Corporation: Unknown device 005e (rev a3) 00:01.0 ISA bridge: nVidia Corporation: Unknown device 0050 (rev a3) 00:01.1 SMBus: nVidia Corporation: Unknown device 0052 (rev a2) 00:02.0 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation: Unknown device 005a (rev a2) 00:02.1 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation: Unknown device 005b (rev a3) 00:04.0 Multimedia audio controller: nVidia Corporation: Unknown device 0059 (rev a2) 00:06.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation: Unknown device 0053 (rev f2) 00:07.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation: Unknown device 0054 (rev f3) 00:08.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation: Unknown device 0055 (rev f3) 00:09.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation: Unknown device 005c (rev a2) 00:0a.0 Bridge: nVidia Corporation: Unknown device 0057 (rev a3) 00:0b.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation: Unknown device 005d (rev a3) 00:0c.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation: Unknown device 005d (rev a3) 00:0d.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation: Unknown device 005d (rev a3) 00:0e.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation: Unknown device 005d (rev a3) 00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 NorthBridge 00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 NorthBridge 00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 NorthBridge 00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 NorthBridge 05:06.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV11 [GeForce2 MX/MX 400] (rev b2) dmesg | grep /dev/ didnt provide any output at all. lsmod yields the following: Module Size Used by Not tainted snd-pcm-oss 36704 0 snd-mixer-oss 12152 0 [snd-pcm-oss] keybdev 1892 0 (unused) mousedev 4020 1 hid 20804 0 (unused) usbmouse 1880 0 (unused) input 3200 0 [keybdev mousedev hid usbmouse] usb-ohci 19368 0 (unused) ehci-hcd 17516 0 (unused) usbcore 58860 1 [hid usbmouse usb-ohci ehci-hcd] snd-intel8x0 18080 2 snd-ac97-codec 52472 0 [snd-intel8x0] snd-pcm 54504 1 [snd-pcm-oss snd-intel8x0 snd-ac97-codec] snd-timer 13412 0 [snd-pcm] snd 31268 1 [snd-pcm-oss snd-mixer-oss snd-intel8x0 snd-ac97-codec snd-pcm snd-timer] soundcore 3396 4 [snd] snd-page-alloc 4712 0 [snd-mixer-oss snd-intel8x0 snd-pcm snd-timer snd] sata_nv 2592 0 (unused) libata 27732 0 [sata_nv] forcedeth 9868 1 pcmcia_core 39172 0 ide-scsi 9392 0
You have to do
wehre hdx is the drive you want to install on.cfdisk /dev/hdx
So, if it is the primary slave (the 80gb one) you have to do
HTH!cfdisk /dev/hdb
My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive.
Yeah, you will have to specify WHICH device you wanted to work with. Also you need to be superuser (ROOT) for that as well.
On my Debian System, I have sudo enabled so;
will return only the master drive; asCode:sudo cfdisk
If I specify my master drive on secondary IDE channelCode:cfdisk 2.12r Disk Drive: /dev/hda Size: 3400040448 bytes, 3400 MB Heads: 128 Sectors per Track: 63 Cylinders: 823 Name Flags Part Type FS Type [Label] Size (MB) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ hda1 Boot Primary Linux ext2 1201.48 hda2 Primary Linux ext2 503.71 hda3 Primary Linux swap / Solaris 511.97 hda4 Primary Linux ext2 1180.83 [Bootable] [ Delete ] [ Help ] [Maximize] [ Print ] [ Quit ] [ Type ] [ Units ] [ Write ] Toggle bootable flag of the current partition
Then, it will return asCode:sudo cfdisk /dev/hdc
If you want to see which drive is being mounted with what file system and space usage/percentage, then you can doCode:cfdisk 2.12r Disk Drive: /dev/hdc Size: 8455200768 bytes, 8455 MB Heads: 255 Sectors per Track: 63 Cylinders: 1027 Name Flags Part Type FS Type [Label] Size (MB) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ hdc1 Boot Primary Linux ext2 8447.37
And I'm sure you already know thatCode:compunuts@tecra:~$ df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/hda1 1.2G 891M 180M 84% / tmpfs 126M 4.0K 126M 1% /dev/shm /dev/hda2 466M 384M 58M 87% /home /dev/hda4 1.1G 263M 790M 25% /var /dev/hdc1 7.8G 3.0G 4.5G 40% /data compunuts@tecra:~$
1. The master drive on primary IDE channel is /dev/hda
2. The Slave drive on primary IDE channel is /dev/hdb
3. The master drive on secondary IDE channel is /dev/hdc
4. The Slave drive on secondary IDE channel is /dev/hdb
and SATA drives are address as /dev/sdx where x is the drive number such as a,b or c depending on the postion of SCSI ID.
HTH ...
P.S --> Yeah, I know my partition system sucks but it's Debian Stable (now you know how old that one is) and the last time I installed the system was when ext3 was in development stage.
Last edited by Compunuts; 02-07-2006 at 04:33 AM.
Hmmm.....as the saying goes, what we have here is a failure to communicate! I really hope the tone doesn't sound too condescending as you guys probably forgot more than I'll ever know about LInux.
Lets see if I can clarify this a little better. On the system I'm having problems with, I am incapable of installing the operating system AT ALL. Now, here's what Im doing.
I've got a 120gb hard drive with windows XP already installed and running as the primary master. What I want to do is install Slackware or any Linux system on the primary slave using an 80gb drive.
When I have the slave drive installed with jumpers set correctly, etc., I insert the slackware installation CD into the cd drive. It installs the bare kernel into the ramdisk and I get this happy little login prompt. So I login as root and proceed to type cfdisk to partition and format the 80gb drive. Guess what it displays? ONLY the 120gb windows drive! There isn't so much as a hint as to the presence of the 80gb slave drive appearing at all.
Now, if I exit cfdisk, the kernel that's installed into ram is pretty stripped down so there really arent many commands that it'll accept at all and it wont allow me to do any of what has been suggested be done.
However, here's where it gets weird because I'm thinking maybe it's a bad cd burn or something. If I swap the positions of the drives such that I make the 80gb drive the master and 120gb windows drive the slave and repeat the above step cfdisk now see's the 80gb drive and NOT the 120g drive and the slackware install goes through without a hitch.
So, to make a long story short, what I wind up having to do is physically remove the windows drive and reset the jumpers every time I need to boot into slackware which is beginning to get really tiresome. And this is why I'm trying to determine if this is an OS related issue or a board level issue.
I hope that clarifies my problem a little more.
Regards and thanks in advance.
Hi,
During install, at the point where you use the cfdisk command, you have to specify what drive you want to use cfdisk on: cfdisk /dev/hdb should show you the primary slave. Cfdisk only shows one drive per invocation, and by default is the primary master.
My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive.
And we still stand corrected.... You NEED to tell Linux WHICH drive you want to work with. It doesn't matter which drive sits where but as long as it's second drive on primary IDE channel, it NEED to be addressed as /dev/hdb .
Being said that, I've never come across an installer which won't show ALL drives. Since I'm not familiar with Slack, I can't tell you much. But in Ubuntu it will show the primary drive in big letters and others are much more obsecure from view. I had to look really close to make sure it's the drive I wanted.
One related note tough. If you install in slave drive but choose to load from HDD, then Grub or LiLo will get installed on primary master's MBR no matter what since it's where the boot flags are.
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