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HDD trouble

I hope someone has more clue than I on this one.

This PC has a mix of SATA & PATA HDDs:

2G for data Something with a 64G partition for OS, linux mint And an old 250G used now & then for a partial backup - other backup HDDs are larger.

All working well. I fit a 500G HDD from a PVR on SATA, gparted format it, keeping it as FAT32. After this the pc won't even try to boot. Setup shows the correct HDD is still flagged for first boot attempt, but nothing. It does its hardware checks, reports the HDDs then hangs.

Remove the new 500G and everything works again.

Er, what's going on?

NT

Reply to
tabbypurr
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Are all 4 drives connected to the mainboard's IDE ports or is a SATA PCI adapter card used to attach the PVR HDD? If so, does the BIOS see the PVR HDD?

Reply to
Pamela

How did you gpart it and format it if the PC hangs at boot with the 500gb drive attached?

Reply to
stephenten

Out of date bios or whatever its called these days? I've even had this happen with a particular ram stick in a usb on one machine. Reason? Not the foggiest, it is fine in a newer pc. Brian

Reply to
Brian Gaff

No idea. Can you put the 500G disk in a USB caddy, plug that into an already-working Mint computer, run"Disks", and look at what it sees when it interrogates the 500GB disk?

I've read somewhere that PVR HDs have a setup of their own - particularly one which used to avoid error checking as it took too long when writing to the disk. Does gparted get round this, or is it possibly integral to the disk controller?

Anything of interest here?

formatting link

Reply to
Jeff Layman

Possibly, because before it was initialised it wasn't 'seen' by the system as a potential boot / required drive?

Cheers, T i m

Reply to
T i m

You probably need to update grub, the system has changed ordering on devices mounting them under different mount points. i.e sda, sdb... er whatever is next (or before) in the list.

Before you trip down that rabbit hole, do a check with and without the hard drive attached - boot from a live CD and check out the output from 'lsblk'.

Google has lots of guides to updating grub, but if you want a hand there are peeps on uk.comp.os.linux or maybe alt.os.unix.mint (not looked there, I'm on debian)

Reply to
Adrian Caspersz

It's inside the disc. gparted doesn't touch that, but it's only likely to come into play if you are doing large amounts of writing - in the way that a security camera does. Most of the time an AV drive will be fine, although I would be wary about storing valuable data on it.

My guess would be the OP has formatted the HDD as bootable in some way that's confusing the boot process.

If in doubt, a complete wipe (with dd or a similar tool) should erase any partition tables on it, and then just make a new partition table from scratch.

Theo

Reply to
Theo

I hope someone has more clue than I on this one.

This PC has a mix of SATA & PATA HDDs:

2G for data Something with a 64G partition for OS, linux mint And an old 250G used now & then for a partial backup - other backup HDDs are larger.

All working well. I fit a 500G HDD from a PVR on SATA, gparted format it, keeping it as FAT32. After this the pc won't even try to boot. Setup shows the correct HDD is still flagged for first boot attempt, but nothing. It does its hardware checks, reports the HDDs then hangs.

Remove the new 500G and everything works again.

Er, what's going on?

formatting link
HTH

Reply to
Renegade

It is probably trying to do something with that new disk that takes an infinite time.

Have you tried a live DVD boot and an inspection of what it finds?

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

A bit of reaearch ssuggest bootiong te machine without the drive, then plugging in the drive, then using hdparm to unlock it.

It seems the problem is the bios scan of the drive

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

If he has a PATA mainboard and added SATA interfaces using a PCI adapater, then I've seen the disk numbering sequence reported differently in the BIOS and by the OS.

The OS boot loader would then access a different drive sequence than shown by the BIOS.

Reply to
Pamela

Formatted it using a live cd, different os

NT

Reply to
tabbypurr

I'll bet that's it, I didn't touch the partition or flags. Will redo it.

NT

Reply to
tabbypurr

Marking a partition as active only serves to tell the BIOS that if it passes control to that drive then control should pass direct to the boot loader in the active partition.

That shouldn't affect a drive not specified in the boot sequence. Most of my hard drives have an OS and an active partition (for hot recovery) but it doesn't affect normal booting from another drive.

This seems possible although the earlier FAT32 formatting should have set up the partition table correctly.

Reply to
Pamela

Quite often what happens is a drive which used to have an OS is reformatted in a way that doesn't touch the boot sector. In a BIOS boot (ie not UEFI), the process is that the BIOS looks for the boot sector (which is 512 bytes only). If it finds something that looks like a boot sector it loads it into RAM and jumps to it. The tiny amount of code there is supposed to chain a secondary bootloader (like GRUB).

The problem comes if it can't find the secondary bootloader, perhaps if that partition has been deleted. There's not enough in 512 bytes to do anything about that, which means it just hangs at a black screen/flashing cursor.

If the BIOS is set to boot USB drives first, it might pick this up if booting with a USB drive plugged in.

The boot sector can survive reformatting of partitions which causes the above problem.

Theo

Reply to
Theo

I didn't touch the partitions at all, just formatted. There were some other megabytes I forget the details of. I need to delete the partitions & start again.

NT

Reply to
tabbypurr

I thought the OP had wiped the disk (including the MBR, anything hiding in cyldinder 0 or elsewhere) and then created a FAT32 partition. Now I see it was just a new a partition. Maybe best to wipe the drive and start again.

Even if this is set up wrongly, I can't see that it would cause a problem (unless mint gets into trouble if it meets a bootloader on a data volume). I suspect a mismatch in volume sequence numbering between grub and the BIOS is more likely.

Reply to
Pamela

I checked it for flags, boot not ticked. I removed partitions & set it up as 1 partition for the whole disc, formatted it. Same problem. Mint 7 will work with it, Mint 17 won't, just hangs at boot time. BIOS boot settings hand't changed, the same named HDD there. Dunno. So I took the easy solution & USBed it. It works ok like that.

What's the issue with using ex-PVR HDDs for data? I've not found any concensus from searching on that.

NT

Reply to
tabbypurr

Boot a live (cd/USB/DVD) without the disk fitted. Use gpart or similar to inspect the numbers assigned to existing disk(s).

Then shut down, add the new disk and do the same again. See if the disk numbers have shifted.

Reply to
Bob Eager

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