# Via VT6241 SATA trouble with mount

## speak2000

Hi everyone, I've been doing gentoo for about a year now, and recently purchased a Via VT6421 SATA/RAID controller. My system is a Tri Boot with Windows XP, Windows 98 and Gentoo Linux 2.6.14r2 I believe. I haven't really worried about this until recently when I got broadband and could finally get online with Linux. And I am sure that /etc/fstab is correct. So that isn't the problem. (I am sure because I have basically the same settings for my other 2 FAT32 partitions and they mount perfectly.)

Anyway, the problem I am having is that on my SATA card I have installed a 250 Gig hard drive. I formatted it (in windows) as FAT32, and everything is fine in 98 and XP. However, inside my linux environment, init cannot mount /dev/sda1, says invalid or bad superblock something or other. So I did (linux) fdisk /dev/sda, and it doesn't tell me anything is wrong with the drive other than my 250Gigs have been reduced to 4! Windows can still read the drive fine so its definitely something wrong with the way the kernel is interpreting data from the drive/card. I refuse to format it :p as there is ALOT of stuff there I don't want to have to move about. 

I have also done fsck.vfat /dev/sda and it doesn't feel like working. Just errors out and quits. 

If it would help the situation, I will post any sort of error messages, lspci, dmesg, or whatever, as I know I wasn't very clear before.

System Specs: 

Main Board-> Intel D850EMV2

x86 Pentium 4, 2.53GHz

1.0 GB pc1066 RDRAM

SATA Card-> Via VT6421 IDE/SATA Raid controller card

MBR-> /dev/hda(1) FAT32, Windows XP, 80GB (c:)

Gentoo Boot-> /dev/hdb1, ext2 32MB

Gentoo Swap-> /dev/hdb2, swap 512MB

Gentoo Root-> /dev/hdb3, ReiserFS, 30GB

Windows 98 -> /dev/hdb4, FAT32, 40GB (d:)

Storage-> /dev/sda1, FAT32, 250GB (e:)

Linux kernel: 2.6.14-r2

Just as a side note, is there a way to convert without data loss, an Ext2 partition to an Ext3?

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## cashewnut

hi,

post your /etc/fstab. can you mount sda1 with 

mkdir /mnt/whatever && mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/whatever -t vfat

hey...can fat32 go 250Gb? sure its not NTFS?

for ext2 to ext3 conversion, use 

tune2fs -j /dev/hdx

hth

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