so close, yet…

i bought a ribbon cable and a 6g hard disk yesterday, got it installed and, after geeking around with jumper settings for most of the morning, got both drives recognised by CMOS, and installed feisty on the smaller one, but when i get around to booting from it, it looks like it’s confused by the second, now slave, hard disk, which, if you’ve been following this miasma from the beginning, has another instance of feisty installed on it which used to be the main OS on this particular machine.

i got feisty installed and running on the primary disk, but so far (not very far along at this point), whenever i try to boot with the secondary disk plugged in, it looks like it’s going to boot, but stops about halfway through and, after some things which could be error messages, but i’m not sure because they don’t stay on the screen for long enough for me to read them, they’re replaced by a flashing cursor with no prompt, and, while i can see the commands i type in, nothing happens.

does linux have difficulty recognising more than one hard disk? i don’t think so (in fact, i sincerely hope not), but i’ve never tried it before. does linux get confused when both the primary (master) and secondary (slave) hard disks have bootable operating systems on them, despite the fact that the primary (master) hard disk has the current GRUB on it?

currently the 6g drive is updating and the 80g drive is unplugged, but it’s got all my data on it. how do i get it off? will i ever be able to use both drives at the same time?

13 thoughts on “so close, yet…”

  1. i don’t have a video card, i have a mobo with onboard video… my guess is that this means another trip to re-pc to get a PCI video card… 8P

  2. Well, that’s no good. What is the driver that you’re using for the video card? Is it the standard VESA driver, or something that’s been tuned to your card manufacturer / onboard chipset?

    If it’s standard VESA, that’s not designed to run high reslutions, from the complaints I was seeing browsing forums. But if manufacturer-specific drivers (like those available from nVidia or ATI) are in use, then those high resolutions become possible and better than the standard ones.

  3. Well, if you use the tools that are there in KDE – the “Hardware tab” in the Monitor will let you change those things (you’ll have to enter Administrator Mode to do it, which is just upping to superuser, then you can look at all the drivers provided for the video cards and monitors. If nothing else, you can use Plug and Play as a monitor driver, if there isn’t one specifically there for your Trinitron, but check to see if someone has written one specifically for the Trinitron HMDA400.

  4. but which driver should i use? they list Mac OS 9.1 to 10.4 and windoesn’t from W2K to vista, but nothing for linux… does it matter?

  5. The regular VESA drivers, by the way, probably won’t be able to handle that resolution.

    And with regard to the 6GB drive, I’d use it as a backup for the one you know is going. Better get the data out of there before things become unrecoverable.

  6. Well, in Kubuntu (which, if I remember rightly, is what you’re running), from the K menu, in the KDE Control Center, there should be a “Peripherals” spot, which has a “Montiors” place, and one of the tabs there should allow you to change your driver, in addition to your desktop size and refresh rate. Drivers for video cards should be chosen with some care (they’ll crash X and you’ll have to try again), so choose the one that makes the most sense for you – drivers for monitors may or may not exist yet for that monitor. If the control center and/or “dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg” both fail to give you what you want, even with a few restarts to try the new configurations, then you can do diving into the configuration file to set the option manually. Hopefully, it doesn’t come to that, but if it does, there is documentation available on how you can go about doing so, and if you’re lucky, there might even be someone who has the specs, like the ones for your monitor:

    Horizontal Scan Range: 30 – 96 kHz
    Vertical Scan Range: 48 – 170 Hz
    Recommended Resolution: 1280 x 1024

    Combined with the appropriate drivers, then you should be able to pump your monitor up to the appropriate resolution and refresh rate.

  7. also, i am familiar with NTFS… i run W2K on my laptop, and i actually prefer NTFS to anything with FAT in front of it…

    i’m not sure if i want to install the 6g drive on linux, or whether i want to install it on my mac as a pre-emptive strike against the failing hard disk… decisions, decisions…

  8. Oh, and the limits on your desktop size might be because of the driver that’s being used for and what Linux detects your monitor as – if you want to go fiddling around in it, you can probably find appropriate configuration options to insert into your xorg.conf (or xserver-xorg.conf) files that will unlock the full potential of both video card and monitor. Or, by chossing a more appropriate driver, you might get back that which was lost.

  9. Ah, finalyl. The magic phrase breaks through. Yeah, the dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg is one I learned quickly, because nVidia support was always finicky – I’d upgrade the package, and I’d have to reconfigure it. Now it works just fine, so I don’t have to worry about it as much, but certain commands you never forget. Like the recovery mdoe option.

    Also, regarding that error “hal-storage-fixed-mount” – sounds like you don’t have sufficient priveleges to mount the volume. Mounting any drive read-write is reserved to superusers and root, I think. So try putting sudo in front of your mount command and see if it works (or using the tools that KDE offers for managing drives and filesystems – they tend to like disks that are always giong to be there and accessible, though, so if that 6GB isn’t going to stay as a regular part of your Linux life, you may just want to mount it only when you need to, rather than using the KDE tools. That’s assuming that you know what type of file system it’s associated with – if it’s anything but NTFS (Which is Windoesn’t’s successor to FAT32), you should be okay. NTFS requires different tools, but the ntfs-3g package is excellent at the task.

    Hopefully this is as helpful as the last tip was.

  10. aha! recovery mode! thank you 8 million times… that was the clue i needed.

    in recovery mode(!! 8D !!), i fixed the xserver-xorg with that dpkg-reconfigure command you mentioned yesterday (it’s also now written in my secret book of obscure-but-useful linux commands, which someone who is a neopagan fanatic would probably call a “book of shadows”), and now i’m booted from the 80g hard disk again (although it’s 1025×768 when i know this monitor is capable of far more than that, because it was with my previous mother board). it’s an extremely good thing, because i would have had to look up all of the mail and web reconfiguring things as well, which i was willing to do, but to which i was very definitely not looking forward…

    but i’m getting this really weird error when i try to access the 6g disk, which is “hal-storage-fixed-mount refused uid 1000″…

    huhwha…?

    meanwhile, i’m thinking that i should go to re-pc and see if they’ve got a used video card that will let me do more than 1024×768…

  11. There should be no confusion at all, best I can tell. I have two hard drives in my own setup, and GRUB has no problem with either of them at all. Of course, I only have the one Linux install.

    Might be worth plugging in the second drive and doing a recover-mode boot, then trying to manually mount the second drive and see f it gives you errors. If there’s no errors there, then you may have to see whether you need to reconfigure so that Ubuntu sees and knows both of them exist and doesn’t care about the OS on the drive you don’t want it to care about. (It shouldn’t care about the other OS at all, which is why that error is weird.)

    Also, something like that, when you get it, try pressing enter withotu typing anything else in and see if it dumps you to a console login or something like that. For all I know, it might still be having issues with X, and that’s the only real problem you’re having.

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