Author Topic: (SOLVED) PCLOS not seeing external SATA drive  (Read 557 times)

Offline besonian

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(SOLVED) PCLOS not seeing external SATA drive
« on: May 26, 2011, 02:16:15 AM »
Problem on a machine running Xfce - though I doubt the DE has any bearing on it, hence my posting it here.

I have, on this machine, a 500gb SATA external drive connected via a USB cable. It's been running fine like that for some months. However, in order to speed up the transfer of large amounts of data, I've just connected it via a SATA cable. (It can use either). At the PC end, because I've run out of PCI slots, the external SATA connector is a converter which plugs into a spare SATA port (of which there are two) on the motherboard. If I switch the drive on before I boot, the BIOS recognizes it correctly. PCLOS however doesn't see it. It's not there in the PCC or via 'df' in a terminal. Is there some file I should download from the repo in order to make the OS see the drive? Or whatever?

The system is Athlon 64 dual core 7550 processor; 2 gb RAM; 2 internal SATA drives; 512mb nVidia graphics.
« Last Edit: May 26, 2011, 09:28:07 AM by besonian »
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Offline djohnston

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Re: PCLOS not seeing external SATA drive
« Reply #1 on: May 26, 2011, 03:22:33 AM »
If I switch the drive on before I boot, the BIOS recognizes it correctly. PCLOS however doesn't see it. It's not there in the PCC or via 'df' in a terminal.

The system is Athlon 64 dual core 7550 processor; 2 gb RAM; 2 internal SATA drives; 512mb nVidia graphics.


If you go into PCC > Local disk > Manage disk partitions, you should see one tab for each internal SATA drive. You should see a third tab for your external SATA, as long as BIOS is recognizing it.

When it had a USB connection, udev was controlling it. Now that it's on a SATA cable, you'll need to create a mount point using the Manage disk partitions tool. Make sure you're looking at the new drive, then create a partition table and partitions, or use what already exists. If you use what already exists, you will still need to create a mount point. When you quit the program, it will ask if you want to save changes to fstab. Answer yes.

NOTE: If you don't specify any mount options, fstab changes won't take effect until you reboot. However, you can open a terminal, su to root, and issue the command mount -a. That will mount all entries in fstab. It won't affect any already mounted. Your mount point should be in /mnt/ directory, and you can create a new name. In the example below, I named one /mnt/Vault.


« Last Edit: May 26, 2011, 03:38:02 AM by djohnston »
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Offline besonian

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Re: PCLOS not seeing external SATA drive
« Reply #2 on: May 26, 2011, 05:33:15 AM »
djohnston - thank you so much for that. Why it never occurred to me to look in the 'Local disks' section of the PCC I don't know. Maybe I'm getting old. Well, we all are eventually, aren't we? I haven't the time to do as you suggest now, but I will later on today and report here. Thank you again.
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Offline besonian

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Re: PCLOS not seeing external SATA drive
« Reply #3 on: May 26, 2011, 09:27:41 AM »
OK. I've done that now and it works. Very many thanks. Great increase in speed transferring data. I'm happy.  ;D ;D
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