devfs not loading first drive (Solved, User Error)

phreakazoid · n00b Joined: 18 Sep 2002 Posts: 8 Location: Ont. Canada eh

I have beed having problems getting the first hard drive mounted under gentoo. i have a triple boot system with two hard drives. the first drive has windows on it and is connected to the internal ide controller. the second drive has Slackware and gentoo partitions on it and is connected to a promise card controller.

it finds all of the partitions on the second drive fine (/dev/hde) but will return the error message :
mount: special device /dev/hdb does not exist
when i try to mount the windoze drive.

my fstab file looks like :
/dev/hde4 / ext3 noatime 1 1
/dev/hde1 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/hde2 /mnt/slack reiserfs noatime
/dev/hde3 /mnt/ftp ext2 noatime
/dev/hdb1 /mnt/win vfat defaults
/dev/cdroms/cdrom0 /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,ro

which is the same setup (except for the cdrom) as my slackware fstab which works just fine.

dmesg returns the following relivant infohda: SONY CD-RW CRX145E, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
hdb: Maxtor 91366U4, ATA DISK drive
hde: Maxtor 5T060H6, ATA DISK drive
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
ide2 at 0xd800-0xd807,0xd402 on irq 10
hde: 120103200 sectors (61493 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=119150/16/63, UDMA(100)
hda: ATAPI 32X CD-ROM CD-R/RW drive, 4096kB Cache
Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.12
Partition check:
/dev/ide/host2/bus0/target0/lun0: p1 p2 p3 p4
Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M

it seems to initialy detect the drive but then does not set it up at all.

can anyone help me figure out how to get it to activate /dev/hdb

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

How is hdb partitioned?
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Quis separabit? Quo animo?

phreakazoid · n00b Joined: 18 Sep 2002 Posts: 8 Location: Ont. Canada eh

one partition, vfat. its a 14gig drive dedicated (except for the boot sector which is grub) to windows.

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

Other than the CD drive and hdb, do you have any other drives on the motherboard IDE channels? I'm looking at hda being a CD and hdb being the HD. Could you connect the CD as hdc then the HD as hda?
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Quis separabit? Quo animo?

phreakazoid · n00b Joined: 18 Sep 2002 Posts: 8 Location: Ont. Canada eh

i could reorganise the drives but i should not have to since it works on every other linux distro that i have used. i would like to keep that setup since it makes it easyer to add and remove aditional devices on hdc and hdd without upseting other OS's.

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

I was suggesting it as a test to see if the problem continued or went away.
_________________
Quis separabit? Quo animo?

phreakazoid · n00b Joined: 18 Sep 2002 Posts: 8 Location: Ont. Canada eh

oh i see.. I will try that tomorow morning. right now i have some services running that i woulld rather not disturb. i will get back to you then.

phreakazoid · n00b Joined: 18 Sep 2002 Posts: 8 Location: Ont. Canada eh

ok i switched the drive layout so that the win-drive is hda, and the cd is hdc
the linux drive is still hde.

and it works!

which is good, but i am still puzzeled as to why i can not have the win drive as hdb with the cd as hda.

any ideas?

BTW: Thanx for your help so far..

phreakazoid · n00b Joined: 18 Sep 2002 Posts: 8 Location: Ont. Canada eh

Ok i figured it out.

As usual when linux screws up its the users fault.

I was bototing it from grub with the switch hdb=ide-scusi (for the cdburner).

I guess that was confusing devfs.