Hard Drive Recognition

[FlipmodePlaya]

I'm trying to install Debian Sid on a system with two HDDs, the master of which has several partitions, and the slave is unformatted. The Debian installer will not recognize either of the HDDs, nor will the live CD I'm using right now. Someone who was advising me earlier gave me some fancy bash command (no idea what it was) that returned some stats about the slave, so I know that it's working. Also, when only the master is connected, it and its partitions are recognized perfectly. The afformentioned advisor seemed to think it was an easily solved problem, so does anyone know what to do?

[JohnT]

Check your jumper settings on your slave drive and make sure it is set to slave. Is it being detected in the bios?

[FlipmodePlaya]

When I enter the BIOS setup, it shows no primary master/slave devices. I've checked this before, and just did again. It only seems to recognize a HDD when just my old one (what is to be the master) is connected. I'm pretty certain the slave is set as such, with the jumpers, and I have triple checked that. My first thoughts on this were that I was having mobo problems, and that I should update the BIOS or firmware or whatever. Then when that guy gave me the command that returned stats on the slave, I abandoned that idea.

[blobaugh]

the slave could be fighting the master for some reason. try putting the slave on the secondary ide channel and see what happens

[FlipmodePlaya]

I think I understood what you told me :confused:

I disconnected my slave optical drive and plugged the slave HDD in in its place. So I had a master HDD on the primary IDE, and a master optical and slave HDD on the secondary IDE. Is that what you wanted me to do? With that, the BIOS didn't recognize any of the optical or hard drives.

[gehidore]

do you know what jumpers are? if so you should have a setup like so.


M S CS
: : :


what you need to do is set the primary drive to master [M]
and the secondary drive to slave [S]

like so


M S CS
[:] : :

M S CS
: [:] :

[XiaoKJ]

I think he has that already.

I prescribe a change of cable -- the IDE cable used might be spolit. Get new ones

[FlipmodePlaya]

Yah, the jumpers are already set.

I actually did try a new IDE cable. I found that only a two connector IDE cable would recognize either drive, but not the three connector one that came with my new HDD. I went out to RadioShack and paid a disgustingly high price for a new three connector cable, but it made no difference. Again, though, whatever command that guy gave me proved that the drive is recognized in some capacity.

[JohnT]

Again, though, whatever command that guy gave me proved that the drive is recognized in some capacity. Look in ~/.bash history for the command and m/b it will refresh your mind and give us a hint..... or just open a terminal and hit the tab button until the command comes up. I don't know what command would allow you to see a drive when your bios doesn't even recognize it , but I'm very curious to see what it is.

[fatTrav]

might be a longshot...

i once had this problem with two identical WD 80 gig hard drives. I was using a non-Western Digital cable and got nowhere. I switched to the cable that came in the box (like the directions said...) and everything was happy. I think something abuot the drives using cable select, I don't remember it was two years ago.

[FlipmodePlaya]

I'm using a LiveCD at the moment, and have rebooted several times since I used whatever command it was. I'm going to try to find the guy and ask him what it was.

The cable I first used was the one Maxtor gave me. Then I thought it was defective, so I bought another (which didn't help).

Thanks for all the replies :)

[fatTrav]

does the bios detect it?

when i had my problem my bios wasn't detecting my drives at all. if the bios sees it, the kernel should see it i'd think.

[FlipmodePlaya]

No, the only way I can get my BIOS to detect either drive is when they're connected with a two connector IDE cable (rather than a 3). Is there any possibility that it just won't see two primary devices, even though I have two secondary ones working fine? If so, do I need to update it, or what? Right now, they're configured as master and slave. Should I try setting them as cable select, or could that not make any difference.

[fatTrav]

Try cable select. I think that is what I had to do for mine. I'd maybe suggest updating your bios but I don't know if that would help.

Maybe try google and G4L for something like "two maxtor drives on one ide" ??