[WYLUG-help] "lost" hdd

[Dave Fisher]

On Sun, Jan 29, 2006 at 01:25:44PM +0000, Mike Goodman wrote:
> Trawled through the howtos at tldp.org and read through a couple without
> furthering my understanding of the system I'm currently concerned with.
> The howtos, it seems, are telling me the principals but not the howtows
> - like how to find out what is happening in this system so remedial
> action can be taken if it's not all as it should be, which is what I
> suspect.
> 
> Rebooted and the system came back up OK.
> 
> command mount on /dev/hda1 and /mnt/hda1 returns:
> mount: mount point /[dev][mnt]/hda1 does not exist
> 
> mount /dev/hdb1 returns
> mount: /dev/hdb1 already mounted or / busy
> mount: according to mtab, /dev/hdb1 is already mounted on /
> 
> ls /dev/hdb1 returns
> /dev/hdb1
> 
> ls / returns
> bin	cdrom	etc	initrd 		and all the rest
> boot	dev	home	initrd.img	which I assume is what we would expect.
> 
> Is this progress? Bearing in mind that what I am trying to achieve is to
> get two hard disc drives working together in a single installation of
> Debian Sarge?

Hi Mike,

Yes, this is progress, but mainly in the sense that you are
progressively telling us more of the things we needed to know in the
first place.

Without wishing to be offensive, I think that you are letting your urge
to take some immediate action, and your urge to interpret what's going
on, to get in the way of diagnosing the problem methodically.

You definitely help us to help you most, when you post the commands you
have issued and their standard output/error, rather than merely
reporting what you are guess might be going on.

For example, can you confirm that the directory called /mnt/hda1
actually exists? e.g. 

  $ ls /mnt/hda1

If the answer is:

  $ ls: /mnt/hda1: No such file or directory

The answer to your problem may have been a rather obvious one, i.e. your
system couldn't mount the other hard drive, because:

  1. At first, you didn't tell the system to mount it at all (in /etc/fstab).

  2. Then (in /etc/fstab), you instructed the system to mount it in a
  place that didn't exist (after previously trying to mount both disks
  in exactly the same place!).
  
From what I can see, the results that you have reported so far are pretty
consistent with this explanation.

If you don't have a directory called /mnt/hda1 (created mkdir or a gui
filemanager like nautilus) you, obviously can't use it as a mount point.

I really don't think that this problem has anything directly to do with
the distro you are using, except in the sense that it's installer
allowed you to initially configure the system to use only one drive ...
something that I suspect most Linux users would prefer to be given the
choice over.

Dave