[solved] Adding a third blank SATA hard drive gives me a...

bdm · Last edited by bdm on Fri Jun 01, 2007 12:55 am; edited 1 time in total

Like the topic shows, I have two SATA drives (sda -> XP, sdb - Gentoo). But whenever I add a new unformatted SATA drive to the, I get a kernel panic saying it cannot mount my root. I'm in Gentoo right now because I unplugged the third drive for the time being. Does the drive have to be formatted in order for me to boot Gentoo successfully?

Any ideas?

RayDude · Posted: Thu May 31, 2007 10:51 pm Post subject:

A few questions:

1) Does your primary SATA controller support four drives? If so are you sure your formatted drives are on input 1 and 2? (maybe 0 and 1 depending on how they are numbered). If your existing drives are plugged into 1 and 3 for example and you plug in 2, the bios may be reordering them. Which leads to question 2.

2) Is the BIOS reporting them in the right order? Look at the drive info page and make sure that the order is XP, Gentoo, Blank. If its not that order then you've got them plugged in the wrong way.

3) Is it possible you have two SATA drive controllers and are plugging the XP and Gentoo drives into the secondary? Then when you plug in the third, it activates the primary controller causing the bios to enable it and put the blank drive as the first drive? (see number 2)

Just some ideas...

Raydude
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bdm · Posted: Thu May 31, 2007 11:17 pm Post subject:

Thanks for the reply, I do appreciate it.

I did get it working for the weirdest reason.

First, like you said, the BIOS wasn't reporting them in the right order. So I switched it up and was getting the same Error. Turns out I had to plug in my third drive in the fourth SATA slot (3). Which doesn't seem to make much sense to me. Because I would have figured that hd0 goes into slot 0, hd1 -> 1, hd2 -> 2.

Now time to plug in my IDE drive.

Thanks man.