[SOLVED]Not recognizing free space for partitioning

[nothingsbirth]

I'm trying to triple-boot a new machine. I created my initial partitions (one FreeBSD, one WinXP) with the Slackware 10 cfdisk because, frankly, I like its interface. Now, when I go to create partitions for Gentoo in my blank space, it doesn't recognize hda. It only gives me hdc (a 458M unwritable partition) and hdd (which is fails to open).

I have tried repartitioning with other cfdisk and fdisk versions. I attempted creating partitions to just format in Gentoo with each of them, but the problem still persists.

I only have one 122G Maxtor HD. Upon further investigation, hdc and hdd seem to actually be my DVD drives(the Gentoo install CD is the same size as hdc and my DVD-RW is empty). Could it be a kernel module that I need to load and don't know about, or something else entirely?

[donjuan]

Unless you are using SATA or RAID of some sort, I really don't see why you are having this problem. Have you tried using a Gentoo LiveCD yet? Is hda listed in /dev? What does it say if you do:

[nothingsbirth]

No SATA or RAID, just a straight IDE primary. I am using the Gentoo LiveCD. The only hard drives listed in /dev are hdc and hdd. When trying to fdisk or cfdisk hda, I simply get a message "unable to read /dev/hda."

I've found some information on hard drives being tucked away in a big /dev filepath in /dev/ide. I will try that when I get back to my computer, but if anyone else has experienced this problem, I would welcome a surefire solution or explanation of what's going on.

[thechris]

not sure i follow here. /dev/hdc should be a disk, not a partition. are you by chance associating unused space with free space?

try this,
dmesg | grep Maxtor

does slackware use lvm or something? if so that might be an issue. not sure.

[nothingsbirth]

My mistake, I meant "disk." I dmesg'd Maxtor and it returns:

hda: Maxtor 6Y120P0 SERIAL ATA hard drive

But, I can't for the life of my find it. It certainly isn't in /dev unless there's some strange place it could be hiding that I don't know about.

[micb]

What's the output of the command

[nothingsbirth]

I tried that fix already, the disc doesn't exist there either; all it contains is a cdrom.

I'm thinking it may have something to do with being recognized as SATA even though it's IDE.

I've now tried Slackware and Debian and they also have problems recognizing and/or mounting the drive. I did get a peculiar warning from Slack about a bad superblock every time the fdisk ran, but then it claimed to have repaired it. It may be having problems with my drive geometry, but I don't really see how that could cause these problems.

[nothingsbirth]

I seem to have gotten to the heart of the matter:
There is no bus0 directory. There is only a bus1 directory, which is probably why linux is registering my DVD drives as hard drives and not recognizing any actual hard drives.

But now...how would I fix this?

[nothingsbirth]