[NCLUG] New 80GB maxtor won't fdisk...

[Michael Dwyer]

C. Michael Crosiar wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> 
> I recently purchased a 80GB Maxtor. The BIOS recognizes the drive, and on
> bootup Linux says it recognizes the drive on hdc, which is correct. But when
> I go to fdisk the drive I get the message "Unable to open /dev/hdc". I
> checked /var/log/messages, and it is reporting :
> 
>     modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module ide-disk
>     kernel: hdc: Driver not present
> 
> of coarse it has to be, or my existing ide drives wouldn't work, right?
> 
> Thanks in advance for your help.

I thought that ide-disk was only for use on devices like SuperFloppy and 
ZIP devices.  You might check the modules.conf file to see if that is 
somehow attaching special drivers to the /dev/hdc device -- especially 
when /dev/hdc is often where a CD-ROM or the like is expected to live... 
Otherwise, it should be used the regular IDE device driver that is 
usually built into the kernel (so you can boot off it...)

For what it is worth, my problem was the opposite -- the BIOS (and 
therefore Lilo) couldn't recognize the drive, but if I gave it vaugly 
correct geometry, it would work... and then, of course, Linux discovered 
the REAL geometry as soon as the kernel took over.

Hope this helps a little...