[SOLVED] Mounting issues - Conflicting addresses?

[KingBongo]

Hi. I am almost as new as you can get to Mint Debian and am already having some issues I have three physical hard drives,

sda (PATA/IDE)
- sda1 : /
- sda2 : /home
- sda3 : swap

sdb (PATA/IDE)
- sdb1 : Used for backup only.

sdc (SATA w/ PCI controller card)
-sdc1 : Files and stuff

Most every time I have the sdc drive plugged in, I get an error message during boot. The message is something along the lines "...could not mount /dev/sda2. Drive does not exist...", which of course is neither true nor any good, lol. Luckily, I can remedy the situation by unplugging the sdc drive and then reboot. That of course is no long-term solution.

I tried the easy way out; Re-install and do all the upgrades. Same issue. For some reason it worked for a few booting sessions. Then I wanted to auto mount the sdc drive, installed "disk-manager" and it all broke again. Could these problems be due to some conflicting addresses or what?

Please help!

[richyrich]

Is that a hot-swap sata controller ? can the drive be plugged in when you have Mint running ?

[KingBongo]

richyrich:
Yes! I just tried it. The disk turned up as an available drive at once. I also tried to mount it. It worked too (no surprise there).

Also, if it is of any interest, here is the relevant part of the output from lspci,

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$ lspci
05:09.0 RAID bus controller: Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3114 [SATALink/SATARaid] Serial ATA Controller (rev 02)

[richyrich]

I think it is because of your computer's BIOS, sata has a higher priority than the pata connections . . .

What designation has the drive been given after it's connected ? sd?

[KingBongo]

richyrich :
Hmmm. Do you really think so? This is a pimped machine from the early Pentium 4 days, a mass-produced Compaq EVO D310. I would say it is from 2003 or even earlier. The BIOS is dated 2003. Was SATA implemented in BIOS that early and for OEM computers?

After hot-plugging, it is now designated as sdc. The others are designated as sda and sdb, respectively. I never understood that part; Why "sd" for PATA disks?

PS. Ubuntu did not have these issues. It had other issues with this drive, I think, but it always booted and mounted correctly.

EDIT: I checked BIOS. The word "SATA" isn't present anywhere.

[richyrich]

Going to get you to try something . . . not sure if it will help or not.

With the drive connected, open a terminal and run :

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sudo update-grub

then reboot with it connected . . . ? ?

richy

[KingBongo]

richyrich:
Nooooooooooo Same $hit again!

[CiaW]

The only thing I might suggest is if you have a separate partition(s) on each device, there might be something wonky with the uuid's for the drives or partitions? How are they listed in fstab, /home in particular since that's the one that seems to be having issues?

One possible way to solve it is to give each partition / device a LABEL, and then add that LABEL name in fstab. If you open > system tools > disk utility there's an option to edit partition and give it a label. I know there's a way to add a label in the cli, but I don't know what it is. An fstab entry with the label designation might look like this, taken from my fstab for a partition I use for sharing data:
LABEL=d2scopy /mnt/d2s ext3 rw,auto,users 0 0

If that doesn't help, posting your /etc/fstab file entries may be helpful.

[KingBongo]

CiaW :
Thank you. Below is what the "fstab" file looks like right now. I don't know if it important or not, but I hot-plugged the sdc (SATA) drive. The file looks suspicious to me. Why aren't sdb and sdc being listed?

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>

proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
proc /proc proc nodev,noexec,nosuid 0 0
/dev/sda1 / ext4 rw,errors=remount-ro 0 0
/dev/sda2 /home ext4 rw,errors=remount-ro 0 0
UUID=f5355ad1-6de9-497b-a8d4-e2abe7336d4d none swap sw 0 0
/dev/scd0 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0
/dev/sda3 swap swap sw 0 0

EDIT: Ok, I tried giving the partitions labels. I labeled sda1 as Root, sda2 as Home, sdb1 as Backup, sdc1 as 1000 GB. sdb1 and sdc1 already had labels. This is what "fstab" looks like now,

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>

proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
proc /proc proc nodev,noexec,nosuid 0 0
/dev/sda1 / ext4 rw,errors=remount-ro 0 0
/dev/sda2 /home ext4 rw,errors=remount-ro 0 0
UUID=f5355ad1-6de9-497b-a8d4-e2abe7336d4d none swap sw 0 0
/dev/scd0 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0
/dev/sda3 swap swap sw 0 0

Why aren't there any changes in "fstab"? Something seems fishy to me

[CiaW]

You'll have to manually add that new info. to your fstab file using your favorite text editor (as root). I usually have a root terminal open and I just type 'gedit /etc/fstab' (no quotes, and type it as root, use gksudo if you're not using a root terminal) and then add each new instance on a separate line. However it appears it has your /home already listed, you could replace the /dev/sda2 with LABEL=Home (it will be case sensitive, so if you labeled it as Home vs home, enter it that way). But since it's already there as /dev/sda2 without a uuid listing, it's probably fine as it is.

For your sdc1 labeled as 1000 GB, is there a space in there? Spaces may not translate well in fstab so I'd change it so there isn't a space. Also, I'm not sure where those other drives are mounting, but it's probably under /media (?). Find out where they're mounting now, that'll make it easier I think. If it's under /media, just create a directory called 'backup' using the mkdir command, then another one called 1000GB or possibly 1kgb. You'll probably have to do it as root, in the media directory. (ex: 'cd /media' then 'mkdir backup') then edit the fstab.

An example line to add to the bottom of your fstab file for the backup drive is below, and do the same for the 1000GB once you rename it, substituting the correct info of course. The ext3 is just a guess as to the file type, you can either enter the file type (ext3, ext4, ntfs-3g, fat32) or just enter none. For options, if you don't want it to mount automatically when you boot, use noauto instead of auto:

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LABEL=Backup          /media/backup         ext3      rw,users,auto     0 0

[KingBongo]

CiaW:
It worked sooooooo good! Thank you! There is just a minor issue though: When I open "Computer" in the Menu, my Backup and 1000GB drives are now listed twice, both of them. One of each can be mounted and opened, the other one gives an error message. I mean, I couldn't care less, I just wonder why?

Another question. HOW COME things like this have been handled automatically by Ubuntu for as long as I remember, but Debian doesn't? That makes me wonder how good the flow is from Ubuntu and upstream.

[CiaW]

Yay! Glad it worked for you.

And on your 2 other questions, I'm sorry I don't have a good answer. On the issue with each one showing up twice, it's some nautilus and/or udev oddity I think.

[KingBongo]

CiaW:
Yes, thank you I saw in "Linux Action Show" (very good show) that Debian has now started a project named "DEX" whose aim is to pull more stuff from distros based on Debian back into Debian again. Maybe that will improve things. One can only hope I honestly believe that (unnecessary) issues like these scare people away. I know it scared me away from plain Debian, too much annoying stuff to fix. Maybe Debian should also start something similar to Ubuntu's "100 paper cuts", if they haven't already. I know this is Debian Testing which is not even guaranteed to work anyway, but it doesn't work in Debian Stable either, but works in Ubuntu (based on Debian Unstable) sooooo...

Anyway, thank you again! Now I "only" have to fix my non-working wifi, which by the way always worked in Ubuntu. Here we go again

[KingBongo]

This issue is a non-issue nowadays. Thread marked as [SOLVED].