Unable to access or detect second harddrive

[John Carlyle-Clarke]

David Park wrote:
> Currently i have installed Ubuntu 7.10 GG and loving it . Now to be
> serious, for some reason Ubuntu cannot detect my second harddrive at
> all.... This harddrive is where i store all my media and backups. The
> harddrive is ntfs.
>   

I had a similar problem on upgrade to 7.10 which rendered my system 
unbootable until I found the cure.  My SATA drives were seen by the new 
kernel but my PATA drive was not recognised.

To fix this, I had to add some extra kernel parameters.  It may be a 
different problem, but it's easy to try.  If this helps, I can tell you 
how to make this change permanent.

When you see the GRUB menu, press "e" to edit the boot entry.   You 
should get a rudimentary editing environment.  Move to the right hand 
end of the line, which should be something like:

/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22-14-generic root==UUID=<some long ID> ro quiet

And add "ide1=noprobe ide2=noprobe" onto the end.  I also suggest 
removing quiet and adding "nosplash" so you get to see all the kernel 
message.  It should look something like so:-

/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22-14-generic root==UUID=<some long ID> ro 
ide1=noprobe ide2=noprobe nosplash

If I remember correctly, you press enter when done editing, and then 
press "b" to boot.

Let us know if this helps, and if so this change can be made in the GRUB 
config so that it sticks.