# ntfs mounting help needed. **SOLVED**

## todd93

I know some of you are growing tired of me posting here, but there is one final item I need help with to complete my new install, and I have some questions that may be helpful to know the answers to. When I installed Gentoo, via the live dvd, I had hard drive options, sda, or sdb. sda contained Windows, sdb is the target where I installed gentoo. This will now become confusing, or at least it's confusing to me, in order to boot into the kernel, I had to set my grub.conf to boot hd1,0 and the device is: root=/dev/sda3.

This has confused me since I have installed. I know that linux is on sdb, and windows is on sda, however, the machine is not seeing that in linux. One thing I have noticed is in cmos, there is a setting that has "native IDE" selected, and when exploring that, I found that "AHCI" is an option, and was wondering if that could be causing this issue.

I will happily provide any and all information that I can to help clear this up.

My fstab:

```
# <partition>      <mountpoint>      <type>   <opts>         <dump/pass>

/dev/sda1          /boot           ext2    defaults,noatime     1 2

/dev/sda2          none            swap    sw                   0 0

/dev/sda3          /               ext3    noatime              0 1

/dev/sr1                                         /mnt/cdrom      auto    noauto$

#/dev/sda1          /mnt/windows    ntfs-3g  defaults,rw,user,umask=0 0 0
```

my grub.conf:

```
default 0

timeout 10

splashimage=(hd1,0)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz

title Gentoo Linux 2.6.31-r6-new

root (hd1,0)

kernel /boot/kernel-2.6.31-gentoo-r6-new root=/dev/sda3

# vim:ft=conf:

title Windows 7 Ultimate

rootnoverify (hd0,0)

makeactive

chainloader +1
```

As a note, yes, windows is working very well (as well as windows can anyway) so it didn't affect the windows install.

Thanks

ToddLast edited by todd93 on Thu Feb 18, 2010 6:47 am; edited 1 time in total

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## NeddySeagoon

todd93,

Grub numbers drives in the BIOS discovery order. Its normally the same as kernel ordering ... but not always.

There is a class of BIOSes that reorder drives so that the boot drive whichever that is becomes the first drive.

This normally confuses grub as when you change the boot order, grub no longer works.

Native IDE mode is a part functional PATA mode for driving SATA, in those BIOSes that support it.

Its intended use is to allow you to install Windows AHCI drivers, so you can switch the interface to AHCI mode and get full performance.

You need to use the AHCI driver in your kernel too.

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## todd93

 *NeddySeagoon wrote:*   

> todd93,
> 
> Grub numbers drives in the BIOS discovery order. Its normally the same as kernel ordering ... but not always.
> 
> There is a class of BIOSes that reorder drives so that the boot drive whichever that is becomes the first drive.
> ...

 

Yes, I understand all of that, I guess what I'm asking is: How can I be sure linux is seeing the other hard drive? I don't even know if it is actually seeing my other hard drive.

When I enter:

```
cd /dev/sd[tab]
```

it gives me the following options:

```
sda   sda1  sda2  sda3  sdb
```

So, with it seeing sda as linux, I try to mount sdb for windows and I get the following error:

```
Error opening '/dev/sdb': No medium found

Failed to mount '/dev/sdb': No medium found
```

I know this has got to be a setting or kernel option somewhere, I just don't know where or how!

Thanks

Todd

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## todd93

Does anyone have any idea of what direction I need to look to solve my problem here? Is there a kernel option that I need to build or something to allow gentoo to actually see the other hard drive? I have ntfs-3g emerged, and have compiled ntfs support into the kernel as a module. Is there anything else I need to do in order to see my other hard drive?

Thanks

Todd

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## todd93

I need to apologize for my trouble here, I figured out the problem, as usual, gentoo has made me feel like a total idiot! I ran sudo fdisk -l and discovered that my windows disk is being reported as hdc1 and 2. so I mounted hdc2, and there is it, large as life.

Thanks for all the help, this one is solved!!

Todd

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