problems with fdisk and sata drive

FuckingFreaky · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 11 Jun 2004 Posts: 128

Hi all!

I've installed Gentoo several times till the 2005.0 release. Now tih 2005.1 I've experienced a problem:
If I do "fdisk /dev/sda" it tells me 'sda' doesn't exist, which is true if I "ls /dev". There in /dev I can see a folder called "discs" and inside it "disc part1 part2 part3". If I do "fdisk /dev/discs/disc0/disc" I can see the SATA drive divided in the three parts I can see in the directory. I mean... it's weird, it doesn't show me the partitions at all, but it divides the drive as in parts (I suppose, but I can't remember, each part could be each logic partition).
If I do "fdisk /dev/discs/disc0/part1" or whichever part it doesn't prints me anything.

It's probably a silly issue, but with earlier installations I could just see all the partitions the drive had with a single "fdisk /dev/sda". What might I do?

Thx!

kimchi_sg · Advocate Joined: 26 Nov 2004 Posts: 2969

fdisk -l will show you everything even if the files in /dev start messing themselves up.

Alternatively cfdisk will also show all partitions.

FuckingFreaky · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 11 Jun 2004 Posts: 128

Thanks man. I'm too tired now so I'll see it tomorrow and tell what I did.

Anyway... is it normal not to have the /dev/sda file? I don't know if I have something wrong or if it's the normal behaviour of udev.
Also another thing that I'm not sure is if I'm going to have to change grub's configuration as the /dev/sda doesn't exist anymore.

Thx!

FuckingFreaky · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 11 Jun 2004 Posts: 128

Am stupid... How am I gonna format the partitions if the unit /dev/sda doesn't exist to the system?
I cannot do "mke2fs -j /dev/sda2" if it doesn't exist! Huh... any help?

Thank you!

kimchi_sg · Advocate Joined: 26 Nov 2004 Posts: 2969

Just run fdisk -l or cfdisk, and they will show you what name to use as the partition name.