My hard drive has died, Ubuntu to blame?

Question

I was running windows xp home edition on my 80gb 7200rpm pata hard drive and decided it would be good to have a backup hard drive in case my hard drive died. needless to say i didn't feel like wasting one of my windows installs on a computer i wouldnt ever use, so i installed ubuntu 8.04 off a friends allready downloaded cd. install went smoothly and everything went fine. heres where i think i made a mistake. I booted up in ubuntu with my 12gb quantum fireball old as the hills hard drive and had my 80gb hard drive set up as a slave. I was curious whether or not ubuntu would run a .exe file so i attempted to open up my 80gb hard drive in ubuntu which still had windows xp on it. Ubuntu didn't like it and quickly refused telling me it was "unable to mount the drive". OK i said no big deal turned off computer and switched back to the 80gb hard drive as my master and POOF "primary drive 0 not found" . awesome i did something wrong. checked the connections and everything was soundly plugged in. went into the BIOS and it didn't feel like recognizing the drive either. needless to say i am a bit flustered over this whole situation and being limited to 12gb of hard drive space (9gb with ubuntu installed) is utterly unacceptable. Any help would be greatly appreciated. I hope this is enough information for someone to diagnose my problems. (i cannot go out and buy a new hard drive or trust me, i would)

Answer 1

I think daryl is right. It's likely a jumper problem.

I'd go one step further and hard set all the jumpers on both drives. Make the windows drive the master, and the other drive secondary.



It also could be an ata100/ata33 conflict error. Ata100 drives don't do well running at ata33, they tend to choke. If the jumper doesn't not fix the issue, then try just booting the 80 gig drive as master. This should tell you if it's a controller conflict



edit

try booting without the 12gig drive to see what happens

Answer 2

In some old computers, it is a matter of which connector you use. Check on the ribbon cable, if you have two connectors, see if it says HD1 on one connector and HD2 on the other. If so, ensure that you are using the HD1 connector. You might also try using "cable select" instead of "master" on the jumper config (try switching them around if it is already on cable select). In the BIOS, is the detection set to "auto-detect"? If there are two controllers on the mother board, make sure you are using the first controller. Dumb question, but we all forget sometimes to do this: Is the power plugged into the HD? Maybe as a last resort while you are in the BIOS, set the board to its factory defaults?

Answer 3

its available the force is basically overheating. attempt employing a can of compressed air to bathe out in spite of dirt is on your pc (a sturdy concept in spite of everything), yet be arranged for extra complication. If its making a clicking sound that basically won't go away, you have a significant situation. decrease back up your records at present and start up up procuring for a sparkling no longer uncomplicated force. repeated BSODs (those demanding and infamous blue displays with errors messages) are additionally a sturdy indication of intense issues.

Answer 4

Disconnect the cable to the drive, boot, shut down, reconnect the cable, boot!

Answer 5

lol n00bz. u forgot to unmount it lol. next time run "sudo umount /media/XXX" or "/dev/XXX" where XXX is your mount point like /media/hdb1 or /dev/sdb1 etc i have no idea what your mount point is, but put it there...

even though it didnt "mount" your drive to a way where u could read/write, it kinda did. the fact that it even knew that it was there meant it mounted it.



be smart next time