[ale] gparted can't find drive in Gateway Laptop

[Jeff Lightner]

Thanks for the suggestion. I already have one of those kits - that's how
I hooked up the external 160 GB EIDE drive I'd bought.   I guess your
suggestion would work since I have more than one USB port on the laptop.

Another idea might be to pop the drive and install it in my Thinkpad
since I know Gparted detects drives there and then do the copy that way.

However, I was really hoping someone might know why Gparted wasn't
detecting the drive in the Gateway when Fedora 7 was.  I wasn't sure if
this was some of Gateway's renowned proprietary (read "pay US or live
with it") architecture or something else.  The fact Fedora sees it leads
me to believe it ought to be something I could configure on use of
Gparted.  

-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Jim
Lynch
Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2008 6:56 AM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] gparted can't find drive in Gateway Laptop

Jeff Lightner wrote:
>
> BASIC QUESTION:
>
> Is there something I need to tell the Gparted on boot that would make 
> it discover the internal drive?
>
> SYSTEM INFO:
>
> Gateway MX6214 Laptop
>
> Internal Drive is Fujitsu MHV2080BH PL-(S1). (This is what BIOS shows 
> and Fedora 7 displayed it as MHV2080B).
>
> (OS on internal drive is Windoze XP Home but since I'm not booting off

> that I don't think that should matter).
>
> DETAILS:
>
> Last night I wanted to use the Gparted LiveCD to do something I've 
> done on various other systems. To whit copy the existing internal 
> drive to a USB attached drive for backup purposes. (Intent to resize 
> existing partitions and make it dual boot Windoze/Linux - just wanted 
> to save what was there first "in case....")
>
> The system has a DVD RW (Toshiba) I think. During boot from the LiveCD

> (originally 0.3.4.8 and later downloaded latest 0.3.4.11 with same 
> results) it shows this DVD drive (the one I was booting from as 
> /dev/sda). It seems to have a long delay where it is trying to 
> discover RAID devices (I suspect because it never finds any internal 
> hard drive). Ultimately it goes past that and starts the Gparted 
> screen but says "no devices found". Doing the rescan for devices 
> doesn't find any.
>
> Once I attach the USB drive and do the boot it finds the USB drive 
> find in Gparted.
>
> I had a Fedora 7 DVD so booted up from it and went through the install

> part to see if it could see the internal drive and it did. (This is 
> why I downloaded the 0.3.4.11 LiveCD for Gparted thinking possibly 
> there was something newer in later kernel revisions but as noted that 
> didn't find it either.)
>
> I did look at BIOS options and saw PlugNPlay and Large File access 
> settings that recommend "Other" for UNIX, Netware etc... but changing 
> those didn't help. None of the other BIOS settings really seemed to 
> deal with the drive and I don't really think it is a BIOS issue given 
> that F7 saw it anyway.
>
> P.S. She bought the laptop last year without asking me so don't tell 
> me she shouldn't have bought Gateway. J
>
I can't help with the detection, but if you get desperate pop that disk 
out and go to Micro Center or Fry's and get one of the cable sets that 
let you connect any disk (2.5, 3.5, ide, sata, etc) to a usb port. Sata 
& IDE to usb adapter, I think they are called. Then run parted on 
another system with both drives plugged in to usb ports. I know it'll be

slow, but it's better than leaving Windows solo! Actually I have a one 
that claims to be able to support two devices at the same time, but that

might be a stretch since the power configuration would exclude 
connecting a sata and a 2.5 both at the same time.

Jim.

Jim.
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