Can't mount my SATA drive

[Duncan Lithgow]

On Sat, 2006-02-18 at 11:12 +1100, Peter Garrett wrote: 
> On Fri, 17 Feb 2006 23:27:53 +0100
> Duncan Lithgow <duncan at lithgow-schmidt.dk> wrote:
> 
> > Mounting manually doesn't work
> > $ sudo mount ext3 /dev/sdb1 /media/sdb1
> 
> sudo mount -t ext3 /dev/sdb1 /media/sdb1
> 
> I think the missing "t" may be why you got a usage error.
Thanks, but that didn't help either

duncan at ubuntu:~$ sudo mount -t ext3 /dev/sdb1 /media/sdb1
Password:
mount: special device /dev/sdb1 does not exist
duncan at ubuntu:~$ sudo mount -t ext3 /dev/sda1 /media/sda1
mount: special device /dev/sda1 does not exist
duncan at ubuntu:~$ sudo mount -t ext3 /dev/sda2 /media/sda2
mount: special device /dev/sda2 does not exist
duncan at ubuntu:~$ sudo mount -t ext3 /dev/sdb2 /media/sdb2
mount: special device /dev/sdb2 does not exist

I've done one and two and a and b because I only have two physical
drives, so if it can see them it should have showed up there...

On the question of what motherboard I have, er where can I see that?
There are numbers and shit all over the place on the board. I can't see
in the device manager anything that looks like it.

I fished out the invoice and it's an MSI 865PE S478 FSB800 SATA. So it's
got both ATA and SATA 'ports' (if that's what they're called, they're on
the board itself.)

I've been fiddling with BIOS and BIOS can definately see it and I can
change it from 3rd to 4th primary or master IDE - but nothing seems to
help, and many of the options leave the system unbootable. I looked for
an upgrade to BIOS but since there is no mention there of trouble with
S-ATA I've decided against risking it.

In my BIOS configurations under 'Integrated Periferals' I have:

ATA Configuration: (options:)
	P-ATA + S-ATA
	P-ATA only
	S-ATA only
	Disable
	
If I use 'P-ATA + S-ATA' I get:

Combined Mode options:
	P-ATA 1st channel
	S-ATA 1st channel

Logically enough if I don't set P-ATA as 1st channel it finds no boot
info and gives up with boot failure. I also get:

S-ATA Ports definition: (I don't understand this, my manual says it's to
do with boot sequence of S-ATA drives, so it's probably not important as
I don't boot from it.)
	P0-master/P1-slave
	P0-slave/P1-master

If the configuration is set to P-ATA + S-ATA I just can't get it to boot
properly. The Ubuntu boot up process gives me "Alert! /dev/hda5 does not
exist. Exiting to a shell." The shell isn't there and I manually
restart.

If the configuration is 'P-ATA only' it boots fine, but gparted (for
example) can only see my primary P-ATA drive.

Any other ideas? 

Duncan