[vox-tech] Puzzling Hard Drive Behavior

[Karsten M. Self]

on Sat, Jan 11, 2003 at 05:56:01PM -0800, Richard S. Crawford (rscrawford@mossroot.com) wrote:
> I went out and bought a brand spankin' new 120GB hard drive for my
> computer, partitioned it appropriately, and put Win2K and Linux on it,
> and put GRUB on the MBR.  But my old 80GB hard drive still has a bunch
> of data on it that I need to get to.
> 
> Thus, I re-installed the old hard drive, set the jumper to the slave
> configuration (according to the documentation that came with the drive),
> and set the jumper on the 120GB hard drive to the master configuration. 
> When I turned on the computer, BIOS auto-detected both drives and
> assigned master/slave status appropriately.
> 
> GRUB appears normally when I turn on the computer, and I select Linux. 
> However, Linux is unable to mount the root filesystem as a r/w system,
> and sets it as read-only.  The whole system fails when it tries to
> initiate the system logger.
> 
> I haven't yet tried booting Windows 2000.
> 
> I'm using Red Hat 8.0, and both hard drives are Western Digital.  I
> referred both to the documentation that came with the drives and the
> Western Digital website to figure out the jumper configuration.

WD has separate jumper configurations for:

  - Master (single disk)
  - Master (with slave disk)
  - Slave (with master disk)

AFAIK, it is not possible to run WD drives as slave, without a master
disk present.

Double-check your jumper settings on both the slave *and* the master
drives.

Yes, I've been bit by this one, it's a PITA.

Peace.

-- 
Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com>        http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
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