Cant mount hard drives!

I recently had a motherboard short out. The computer in question was so old I decided to build a new system rather than replace the board. Once I built my new pc, I put my old hard drives into it (pata). The two hard drives are western digital caviars formatted in ntfs. There is a 80gb and a 500gb. I want to copy my old files from the 80gb onto the 5000gb so I can reinstall windows (old install was not bootable.) I load up a knoppix live cd (actually, I have it on a flashdrive), but the only drive visible is my flash drive (it is listed as sda1). I cannot seem to mount my hard drives. When I type mount into the command prompt, I get a list of drives/ramdisks, but none looks like either of my hard drives, although I'm not sure I'd know what to look for anyway. They all fail to mount or are already mounted. I believe this problem may have something to do with the fact that my new motherboard uses a marvell ide controller, but this is just a guess. I also made a windows xp live cd with Barts PE loader and it couldn't detect my hard drives either. What can I do? Thanks ahead of time!

I think MrLinux is probably right. Many newer motherboards come with really crappy IDE chipsets ( JMicron ) which can have very poor compatibility with Linux, *BSD and even windows.

You may need to manually install the driver.

Run "lspci -vvvvv" on Knoppix and post it here or PM it to me.

That will hopefully help us figure out what kind of chipset you have.

Good luck

Can you also run dmesg and post it too?

I'm having some trouble getting the full lspci from box.net can you use pastebin.ca or pastebin.com instead?

LVM works fine even from a rescue or Live CD. I have not had any problems with LVM.

Semper Fi

Thanks got it

How old is your copy of Knoppix? Do you know what version it is?

It looks like you have an ASUS Intel board with some very new hardware and Knoppix is having some trouble picking it all up ( probably because it's older ). Your lspci is full of unknown devices.

Ubuntu 8.10 desktop amd64 ( x86_64 ) or Fedora 10 x86_64 should be able to recognize more of your hardware, both have Live CD versions.

Between the two Fedora usually has better device support than Ubuntu. Most of the time if your hardware isn't recognized by the latest Fedora, try the latest Ubuntu and vice versa.

http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download

Good luck

You can use k3b ( kick *** CD/DVD burning software ) from within Knoppix booted from your flash drive to burn an Ubuntu 8.10 desktop amd64 ( x86_64 ) or Fedora 10 x86_64 CD

The Live CDs can be downloaded from various mirrors around the world ( see links above ) and are about 650-700MB each, which is large but a lot smaller than a 4.3GB DVD

Fedora has the latest drivers, software and kernels so it usually has very good hardware support. Ubuntu is a close 2nd.

Try both if you can

I made a live usb of Fedora ten and it works great. It even found my ethernet drivers. I may actually make a full install on my hard drive once I get everything working. I've been wanting to get experience with linux for a while but I always have driver issues. Thanks for the tip linux_o!