Unmountable and half-detected IDE drive, strange udev issue?

[lat3ncy]

I have just installed a trusty 40GB hard disk in my Gentoo server.

The bios/IDE driver are able to detect the drive as /dev/hdd (/dev/hdc is a cdrom drive)

The drive appears in /proc/ide, all correct.

However when I tried to re-partition it as a linux drive, cfdisk is not able to detect the drive and the existing partition it is not mountable, I get "mount: /dev/hdd1 is not a valid block device"

I just pulled the drive out of another computer, it works perfectly and is blank but has a single Windows NTFS partition on it but I know this should not cause this problem.

My Gentoo server is running udev.

Any ideas what I might try?

[tornamodo]

i had some crazy errors with my hd and partitioning too, althought they were slightly different...

1. make sure, you've jumpered your hd's correctly
2. put the hds (if you have 2) on the primary cable and the cd on the secondary (always last)
3. make sure that the ide-cable is working (if in doubt, exchange it)

this was what helped me and chances are that it might work...

[lat3ncy]

Thanks for the suggestions, the drive is jumpered correctly as slave but I will try swapping it to master. I can't put it on the primary channel though due to cable length problems but I will try swapping the drives over on the same cable and see if that helps