# kind of a stupid question, but it stumped me

## arkane

I just picked up a 120gig western digital harddisk (the one with the 8meg cache... god it's sweet) and when I put it into the system it recognized it on boot as /dev/hdd but fdisk wouldn't open it.

I tried /dev/ide/host0/bus1/target1/lun0/disc and no dice there, either.  It wasn't reporting like normal though at boot... it was only telling me the model number and brandname, and not the full details like normal such as the sector/track/cylinder count and mb count.

I didn't know what to do, so I went into Win2k and went into the computer management, drilled down into the drives, and it had that disk there ready to have something done to it.  However, the only option I had at the time was to write a "signature" to it.  (It had a red minus sign icon on the drive, meaning there was some kind of error)  I wrote the signature (well, Win2k did transparently with my click to do so) and the icon went away.  I rebooted back into gentoo, and what do you know!  The drive posted properly, with cylinders/tracks/sectors and mb count.  I was and still am a little perplexed.  Is there something I should have done in Linux to write a signature to the drive?  I added the drive to my Volume Group and pvmove'ed all data over to the drive, and it worked perfectly after that. (I pvmove'ed all data back to the original disk and reduced it from the Volume Group to remove the disk afterwards, so it's not a factor in the computer any longer... it's for a new system)

It kind of makes me wary because when I buy another disk, I may well not have a Windows operating system on anything other than VMWare.

What should I have done differently?

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## pjp

Does your BIOS recognize 120G drives?  I had to buy an ATA controller to use an 80G I recently bought.

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## arkane

 *kanuslupus wrote:*   

> Does your BIOS recognize 120G drives?  I had to buy an ATA controller to use an 80G I recently bought.

 

Yeah, the bios recognizes 120gig drives.  I updated the bios about a week or so ago for that reason. (never bothered to update the bios before, and saw that Abit had a fix for large drives) As i said, after the signature was written by Win2k, Linux saw the drive perfectly.

what the heck is a signature anyway?

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## pjp

Yeah, but Installing Win2k so you can write a signature to a hard drive is not a reasonable solution  :Smile: .  

I'd be curious to find out how to make linux recognize it on its own.  Perhaps it was an fdisk limitation.

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## arkane

 *kanuslupus wrote:*   

> Yeah, but Installing Win2k so you can write a signature to a hard drive is not a reasonable solution .  
> 
> I'd be curious to find out how to make linux recognize it on its own.  Perhaps it was an fdisk limitation.

 

Perhaps... and luckily I didn't have to go that far.. I just added the drive as a slave on my secondary ide controller.  I have Win2k and Gentoo installed on my primary drive.

cfdisk isn't in the portage selection the last I checked, so fdisk is the only alternative  :Sad: 

I'm definately curious because I want to (finally after 6 years) completely be on a Linux platform.

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## pjp

I think cfdisk is in a tools package or something similar.  I have it on my system and didn't emerge it specifically.

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## gsfgf

did you run a low-level format w/ the included drive utils.  Thats like to be the problem.

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## arkane

 *gsfgf wrote:*   

> did you run a low-level format w/ the included drive utils.  Thats like to be the problem.

 

A low-level format on an EIDE drive?  the last time I ever heard of needing to run a low-level format on any drive was back in the days of MFM/RLL.

Besides, this drive came as a stand-alone unit without drive disks.  What if I didn't have a Windows/DOS partition?  It was properly recognized after I went into Win2k and wrote a "signature" to the drive through MMC disk-management snap-in.

How does/did everyone else do it?  The last drive I installed was a 10gig western digital and that was as simple as popping it into the system, fdisk'ing it and that was all.

--

Dan

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## c_kuzmanic

Friend of mine had that exact same problem. He bought a 160GB harddrive and even though the bios would recognize it , fdisk would not. Mounting under windows, partition magic - nothing helped. He went nuts with it for about a week, updated the bios, tries innumerable different settings/layouts and ended up returning the drive.

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## knala

Hmm... I wonder... from your description this sound like it might be something to do with digital rights management.  :Evil or Very Mad: 

In which case the way to deal with it is to return the drive.   :Wink: 

knala

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## OdinsDream

I bought the same WD 120GB harddrive, and had no trouble installing it (aside from setting the jumpers incorrectly, but once that was solved...) everything went fine. 

fdisk did warn me about the maximum cylinder size being very high, but it only mentioned I could have issues with other partitioning software. It wrote partitions to the drive correctly, and once linux was installed, df -h returns the correct total drive capacity. I'm using the ext3 filesystem.

The only difference i can see between my situation and yours was I had the drive as /dev/hda whereas you say you were using it as /dev/hdd

are you certain it's /dev/hdd, wouldn't that be your Secondary Slave IDE device? If it's your primary master drive, it's going to be /dev/hda

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## arkane

 *OdinsDream wrote:*   

> I bought the same WD 120GB harddrive, and had no trouble installing it (aside from setting the jumpers incorrectly, but once that was solved...) everything went fine. 
> 
> fdisk did warn me about the maximum cylinder size being very high, but it only mentioned I could have issues with other partitioning software. It wrote partitions to the drive correctly, and once linux was installed, df -h returns the correct total drive capacity. I'm using the ext3 filesystem.
> 
> The only difference i can see between my situation and yours was I had the drive as /dev/hda whereas you say you were using it as /dev/hdd
> ...

 

Yeah, I'm positive it was a slave on the secondary ide channel.  I have a 10 gig western digital as master on the primary channel, and a cdrom as slave on the primary, a cdrw on master on the secondary, and the only one that was left open was a slave position on my secondary ide channel.  The kernel even posted it as being /dev/hdd in the dmesg.

I'm starting to think it was this board I'm using.  Since you've had no issues popping it in and going at it, i shouldn't have had issues either.  But since I did, and the jumpers were set correctly and the proper channel allocated, it must be a board issue.

It sounds to be like my Abit BH-6 board with the newer bios flash didn't really provide support fully for the >40 gig harddrives....

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## arkane

 *knala wrote:*   

> Hmm... I wonder... from your description this sound like it might be something to do with digital rights management. 
> 
> In which case the way to deal with it is to return the drive.  
> 
> knala

 

I wish I knew what that digital rights management stuff was all about.... 

but then again, doesn't it require software that actually knows about it?

I bought it online, so taking it back isn't trivial lol... it's working, but it was just getting it working that was the issue.  post-mortem forenzics I guess is what this is.

--

DanLast edited by arkane on Wed Jun 05, 2002 5:40 pm; edited 1 time in total

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## arkane

 *c_kuzmanic wrote:*   

> Friend of mine had that exact same problem. He bought a 160GB harddrive and even though the bios would recognize it , fdisk would not. Mounting under windows, partition magic - nothing helped. He went nuts with it for about a week, updated the bios, tries innumerable different settings/layouts and ended up returning the drive.

 

That would definately drive me nuts.... fortunately the drive works great, it just needed a kickstart by Windows 2000's disk manager.

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## gsfgf

Don't Put HDDs and CDs on the same channel.  A channel w/ a cd slows down to 33mbs instead of 100.  Put the drives on chan 1 (or 2) and the CD's on the other

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