issues with SATA hard drives

[Geoffrey Leach]

On 12.24 09:13, rramineni wrote:
> I am trying to install FC 3 on a dell dimension 8400
> PC. The mother board comes with 4 port SATA interface.
> There are two hard drives currently installed, one
> with win XP and the other one is for installing linux.
> When I boot up with windows, both the drives seem to
> be working fine.
> 
> Seems that the linux installation will not recognize
> both of the drives.
> 
> The SATA controller is Intel 82801FR SATA AHCI
> Controller
> 
> Has any one had similar issues before? Any help will
> be greatly appreciated

Short answer. I have a dual-SATA MB with XP and FC3 sharing one drive  
and and EXT3 file system on the other.  Both work fine.  Controller is  
Promise, so its not a perfect answer.

Long answer.  You need to provide more complete information. You  
presumably have XP on the first drive.  You've installed  
"linux" (hopefully FC2 or FC3, or you're on the wrong list) on drive 1,  
yes?  And FC boots properly?  What does the boot menu (aka the Grub  
menu) show you?  When you say that, "the linux installation will not  
recognize both of the drives," presumably you mean that it won't  
recognize drive 0, because if its running it must have found the drive  
its installed on.  What does /etc/fstab say about the XP drive?  
Anything?  If you have XP in an NTFS file system, there should be  
something like:
	/dev/sda1               /dosc                   ntfs     
noauto,defaults 0 0

where /dev/sda1 assumes that XP is on partition 0 of the first drive  
and /dosc is a directory that you create.  You'll also need to load the  
ntfs kernel module.  However, as the ntfs module does not support  
writing to the files on the FS, this may be a waste of time for you.