NTFS drives - non existance

[SparkyLabs]

I have 8 SATA ports on my motherboard. 6 are provided by the main SB chip of the chipset (intel) and 2 are provided by a chip that gigabyte re-branded as their own.

So I have one 750 GB disk on one port and that has a 40 GB linux mint partition and 650 GB NTFS partition of data. I have another 400 GB NTFS disk that works fine too. Problems start when I try to connect a third 320 GB NTFS disk (that only contains data). The disk is not recognised "hot plugging" it. rebooting caused some interaction on boot up but then neither the 320 or the 400 GB NTFS disks were recognised....

So I removed the 320 GB again and rebooted and the 400 GB disk came back (and the 650 GB on the main disk is always visible).

So what the hell is going on ? is it the NTFS file systems causing a problem ? I don't mind changing to FAT32 but can't use linux file systems for data disks because I use them interchangeably on windows systems.

[Ginsu543]

Wow, just realized that this is a pretty old thread.

I'm not sure whether this will fix the problem, but your mentioning that your third drive is not "hot-pluggable" got me thinking. Have you set your SATA drives as AHCI or IDE? Like you, I have several drives formatted to NTFS because I use them to share data among Linux, Windows, and OS X. My SATA subsystems are all set to AHCI, and I can see every one of my NTFS partitions (4 are entire drives and 2 are partitions inside drives). So, this is certainly possible with NTFS partitions, without having to go to FAT32.

[SparkyLabs]

you are right, this is an old thread. Like all the other problems i have with mint - NO HELP. I am now back on windows 7 and to be honest so much better than any of the linux distrubutions i tried. All of the linnux distro's I tried promissed to be the "be all end all" and none delivered other than wasting my time. So i have vowed once again to not touch linux until the linux community grows up ! No offence intended to anyone but I have a bog standard Pc and no reason why a decent distro should not work, I mean sweet jesus windows 7 makes most distro's pale out of existance for the average user ! I need a working system, not a hobby of fixing other peoples shortcomings after promissing to deliver the goods. I don't particularly like microsoft but i learnt to appreciate them a lot more after 4 months of trying my damndest with linux and getting nowhere other that "attitude" from people who thought they knew it all.

Don't mean to upset anyone but the message is clear, linux will only ever be for users who want to program computers or mobile phone users !

[Ginsu543]

Glad you found an OS that works for you. Just trying to help.