Thanks for a sensible reply steve szmidt:
>>>> Does anyone know how to make the former "not a block device" into
>>>>a "block device"?
>>>It sounds like the drive has gone beyond being accessable. Can you boot
>>>from it?
>> Works fine, except for the head sticking to the landing zone a bit.
>>It's old, but I use it most days.
> Try using fdisk -l to list the drive when booted on the 80G. You could also
> try booting from a CD and see if both drives are still visible. It's
> interesting that you can boot from it but the other install cannot read it.
> Can you see the 80 from the 40?
I did, fdisk, cfdisk and mount can not see /dev/hdd if:
"mount: /dev/hdd1 is not a valid block device" but it is spinning.
The other drive can always read it, unless it "spins up" too
late to get mouinted, only then can it not read the nonexistent drive.
I can always reboot and it is absolutely fine. (it doesn't always take off late,
but more frequently as time goes by) I can hear when it take off late.
I STILL need to know how to tell the system to re-evaluate /dev/hdd(1) .
Both drives have only ONE partition, it's Slackware after all.
> One thing you could try is to move the bad drive (in grub) to a different
> controller / channel. Then use something like 'map (hd4) (hd1)' to map the
> 4th drive as the 2nd (the way it was before we started this.) Note hd0 is the
> first drive. That will show if there's a problem w the channel.
Can't be, the motor and platters frequently take off 5 or 10 seconds
after power on, even if I go into the "bios setup."
> You have two IDE controllers and two channels per controller. Keeping slower
> devices (drives) on the same controller slows down the faster. So you may
> want to have the faster 80G on hda (first controller, first channel). Then
> put the 40G and the cdrom on the second controller, hdc and hdd.
I sort-a do. I have, and it suits me well:
80 = hda 40 = hdd CD-RW = hdb iso images are always on hdd.
> The magnetic charge on a drive will weaken over time unless recharged. (At
> least on older drives, I think newer ones automatically recharges it's been
> too long since I looked at that.
> You could attempt rewriting the boot sector. If old drive is hdb then
> dd if=/dev/hdb of=bootsect.img bs=446 count=1
> then copy it back with
> dd if=bootsect.img of=/dev/hdb
> If hdb does not have a legible boot sector you can read it from the distro CD
> by replacing /dev/hdb with /dev/cdrom or whatever points to the cdrom.
> If you get to the point of needing to rescue the drive you can also use dd. If
> the old drive is hda and the new one is hdb, then
> dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=4K conv=noerror,sync
40 Gig is totally backed up on the 80 Gig, and vice versa except for some recent
news group downloads awaiting assembled into a CD-R write.
--
Ron KA4INM - I think I could live on my pay if
governments didn't take half!
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