How to connect four edi devices? - solved.

[Josef Lowder]

.
Just a note to say I finally got the subject installation 
solved (and learned a lot in the process). 

Apparently there are several problems involved, including 
the fact that the bios cannot see a second drive, even though 
PCLinuxOS can see it and use it, once installed. 

Also, I must say that PCLinuxOS is by far the nicest Linux 
distribution I have ever seen.  It seems, at this point, that 
everything "just works!" ... right out of the box ... including 
many things that I have never been able to get to work with 
several other distros.  And isn't it ironic that Tex (the 
"creator" of this distro still calls everything "beta." 

-------------------
On Tue, 01 May 2007, Jim wrote
> Josef Lowder wrote:
> > .
> > On Mon, 30 Apr 2007 20:06:40 -0700, Eric \"Shubes\" wrote
> >>> Ironic that I can write to a drive on the second ide channel 
> >>> even though bios doesn't see it.  But I could not figure out 
> >>> how to get the installation on the second hard drive to boot.
> >> The bios can see it all right w/out necessarily being able to boot 
> >> from it. If you look at the IDE devices in your bios, I'm betting 
> >> that they show up. That doesn't mean they're all bootable. Older 
> >> BIOSs may not boot from anything other than the primary master.
> > 
> > No, bios cannot see it.  That is the strange and frustrating dilemma.
> > It just does not show up there in the bios at all.
> 
> An earlier version of the server I have at home had a BIOS that 
> couldn't properly detect a driver larger than 8.4GB.  I had 2 60GB 
> and 2 80GB drives in it.  The bios would see them as 8.4GB drives. 
>  I used a floppy to boot the machine.  After Linux started loading,
>  it detected the drives properly.
> 
> Here's another one for you.  I have one of those USB hard drives.  I 
> plug it into my slackware 11 box, but can't mount it.  Lsusb shows 
> the drive. However when I try mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/whatever 
> I get an error message saying /dev/sda1 isn't a valid block device.  
> When I plug in my mp3 player and enter mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 
> /mnt/whatever it's mounted and I can add files to or delete files 
> from it.  Go figure.