Re: [PLUG] Accessing a FAT32 drive from Linux

[Kevin Brosius <kbrosius@kns.com>]

George Langford wrote:
> 
> Hello PLUG !
> 
> Waaaal. I gave up the AK74-EC and its botched WinXP install as
> hopelessly mangled, so now I just want to be able to read one
> of the 80GB Maxtor drives whose drive letter got swapped with
> its clone, so that I an retrieve the 10GB or so of data that
> I entrusted to it.
> 
> I find that I can install this drive (onto which I did not clone
> any information after starting my attempt to install WinXP in the
> AK74-EC system) in the BookPC running an unsupported Cosmos
> Engineering installation of Red Hat Linux.  I simply disconnected
> the IDE-bus CD burner and hooked up the 80GB hard drive in its
> place, jumpered as Slave.
> 
> If I start the BookPC with the 80GB drive as first boot device and
> a W98SE boot disk as 2nd boot device, W98SE attempts to start in
> safe mode, but hangs up while installing hardware for which it
> can't find drivers that it expects to find on the W98SE Installation
> CD, which isn't there.  The Cabinet files are on the 80GB drive,
> however.  It's just that I can't get to them.
> 
> If I start the BookPC with the 40GB Maxtor drive on which Red Hat
> Linux is loaded, it starts & runs just fine with the Linux OS, but
> doesn't detect the 80GB drive.  That's my question to The List:
> 

Interesting... When you say doesn't detect, what do you mean?  Does the
IDE probe during the boot sequence show only the 1st drive?

If so, that's usually just a problem with the cabling and/or drive
jumpering (master/slave if needed.)  Since different drive manufacturers
support different methods of setup, this is easy to get wrong...  Some
don't need to be jumpered, some do, etc.

Also, it's possible that those two drives can't be used in a
master/slave setup on the same IDE port.  That problem is a lot less
common though.

Does this PC have dual IDE ports (4 drive) capability?

> How do I persuade Linux to access this 80GB drive so I can
> retrieve my data ?  It was originally formatted FAT32 with EZ-BIOS,
> a Maxtor proprietary utility that's part of the MaxBlast hard
> disk installation procedure.
> 
> The good news is that W98SE can read the drive when it's the first
> boot device, so it hasn't been completely hosed.
> 

-- 
Kevin Brosius
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