I've used Slackware since 1994 and never had installation problems till yeserday.

Lately I've been running Mandrake 10.2 and Windows XP from my 200G internal ATA scsi hard drive, with Windows XP as /dev/sda1 and Mandrake on 4 extended partitions under /dev/sda2. I also have two USB external scsi disks. Mandrake calls these /dev/sdb1 and /dev/sdc1. They are, respectively, a Maxtor and a Western Digital.

I recently decided to return to Slackware, and yesterday I tried to replace Mandrake with Slackware 10.2, retaining the XP partition, but found that it did not detect the internal drive -- just the external ones, calling them /dev/sda and /dev/sdb.

I thought at first that by "sda" it meant the internal drive and by "sdb" the Maxtor, and went ahead and installed, though I wondered why it didn't appear to see the Western Digital and why fdisk didn't list the existing partitions on the internal drive and give me the option of retaining the XP partition. In consequence, Slackware got installed on the Maxtor and left the internal drive
untouched.

When I realized what had happened, I tried installing from scratch with both of the externals unplugged, but in that case it saw no hard drives at all.

After much wasted time I gave up installing and am still using Mandrake.

Can anyone explain what might be causing this? (Mandrake and Windows have no problem identifying the disks, so it must be something in Slackware.)

Thanks,

Bob McCracken

hi there,

once had the same symptoms during an install and got the following advice to locate my drive:

you can try above to see the output, the problem for me turned out to be that i was using the default bare.i kernel on a SATA harddrive,
simply using the sata.i kernel instead of the bare.i solved my problem.

don't know if the same applies with you, but first try to see the output of the quoted commands.

Which boot-kernel did you choose?

Try the sata-ones (sata.i or sata.r, can't remember :}) ... the
bare.i knows nothing of SATA controllers.


Cheers,
Tink

Yes, I mainly tried bare.i. Slackware includes 4 scsi.s kernels and I also tried a couple of them without success.

Regarding sata.i: Is it correct for scsi, or is it ide-only? (The ".i" suffix suggests the latter.) Or does it have nothing to do with the bus type?

Thanks,

Bob McCracken

its easy tind out if it works,

boot from disc 1 using the sata.i kernel
use the command "fdisk -l"
if it shows your drive then its the sata.i you need