Amazing tricks you can do with your IDE interface

[jbk at mail2.gis.net (jbk)]

Bill Horne wrote:
> OK, this is one for the record books. If you can explain it, please 
> call me. 
> 
> Scenario: a client with a fried Maxtor disk, which is identifying as 
> "N40P" during boot - a sure sign of system area failure. The BIOS says 
> it's on the IDE Primary Master.
> 
> The BIOS also identifies a WDC<mumble> on the Secondary Master - a Jazz 
> drive which is undamaged.
> 
> Now, the mystery:
> 
> I boot Knoppix from CD, and the system auto-constructs the fstab file, 
> which shows /dev/hdc1 and /dev/hdc5. I understand /dev/hdc5, (assuming 
> jazz drives have the same format as Zip disks), but /dev/hdc1 has me 
> _very_ confused.
> 
> I try to mount /dev/hda[1-4], and each errors out on seek and/or read 
> errors. Sure enough, the Maxtor is fried. 
> 
> However, I _AM_ able to mount _BOTH_ /dev/hdc1 and /dev/hdc5, and I
> can transfer data from /dev/hdc1 to the new, shrink-wrapped jazz disk
> mounted as /dev/hdc5. Moreover, the client recognizes the data I'm 
> able to move!
> 
> So, the question is: what/where is /dev/hdc1? There's only one hard
> drive in the machine, and I've verified that it's connected as the 
> Primary Master IDE device.
> 
> All opinions welcome, on or off list. TIA.
> 
> Bill Horne
> 781 784-7287
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> Discuss at blu.org
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> 
That might be a characteristic of knoppix. The bitdefender liveCD is 
based on knoppix. When I booted my laptop with it, it assigned the hard 
disk to hdc. After several reboots it assigned the disk to hda.
Can a jazz drive have more than one partition? I am not familiar with 
them. Can you run du or df to get a disk size read?
Jim