[TriLUG] Linux on Toshiba laptop not recognizing 2nd hard disk!

[William Sutton]

If the extra hard drive is hot swapable for the floppy drive, it would 
make sense from a Windows perspective to flag it as a dynamic drive and 
manage things in its own way.  It's obnoxious if you want to use it in a 
non-Windows setting, but makes sense.

Out of curiosity (and realizing that you might have to find a way to 
revert it), what happens if you copy the data off, format the drive as 
vfat, and put the data back on the drive?  I'm curious if it 1. will still 
register as dynamic (or, hopefully, not) and 2. will be usable under both 
Windows and Linux for read/write.

William

On Sun, 15 Feb 2004, Phillip Rhodes wrote:

> 
> > 
> > I'd try it anyway.  If nothing else, there may be an informative error
> > message waiting for you.  The special block devices already exist (as you
> > probably already know) in /dev for hdc1 through hdc32 regardless of whether
> > such partitions actually exist on the attached device.
> > 
> 
> Never mind, I figured out what was going on.  Win2K has the drive
> flagged as a "dynamic disk", which is some microsoft abomination
> that "borrows" filesystem type 0x42 from which was used by
> SFS. Hence, fdisk -l identifies the drive as being formatted
> as SFS.
> 
> And it only shows one partition, because apparently
> this win2k dynamic disk business creates one huge partition
> on the disk, and then manages the space to create what could
> be considered "virtual partitions," something similar to the old
> extended partition deal.
> 
> So my task now becomes figuring out how to revert the disc to a
> "basic" disc.  Right now disc manager has that option grayed out,
> which I'm presuming is because there is data on the drive.  :-(
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Phillip R.
> 
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