[nmglug] Using Media Bay Devices In Dell 600m With Fedora Core 3

Tue Jun 7 12:04:29 PDT 2005

Did some more testing last night to try and answer your questions.

On Mon, June 6, 2005 5:20 pm, Gary Sandine said:
> On Mon, Jun 06, 2005 at 05:11:11PM -0600, William D. Nystrom wrote:
>> On Mon, June 6, 2005 5:00 pm, Gary Sandine said:
> ...
>> > Can you elaborate on "not been able to get this to work"?
>>
>> When I try to boot up with the media bay hard drive installed, the
>> boot process appears to hang.  I've let it hang for a few minutes
>> but not for a really long time so if there was a really long timeout,
>> then I have not seen that.
>>
>> > What have you tried?  Any error messages?
>>
>> Only thing I have tried is booting with the media bay hard drive
>> installed
>> and trying to research the problem.
>>
>> > Does the system boot at all with the media bay hard drive
>> > installed?  If so, what does
>>
>> No.  The system will boot with the media bay empty, filled with the
>> CDRW/DVD combo drive or filled with the extra media bay battery.  It
>> will not complete the boot process with the media bay hard drive
>> installed.
>
> Oh, OK.  How far does it get before it hangs?  What are the few
> messages prior to hanging?

There is quite a bit of output but it is difficult to record.  It also
appears that the formating of the boot output gets messed up some.  There
are alot of error messages that basically have the form of:

can't do something because of "read-only file system".  I think it may
always be referring to various things on the /var file system.  Near the
end, it gives me a full screen warning that it could not start the X server
due to some internal error.  When I click OK, it then reverts back to a
boot screen which has the message:

cardmgr[2098]: unsupported card in socket 1

This all makes me wonder if the boot process is somehow trying to get
info from the second hard drive.  This second hard drive is from another
laptop and has a bunch of files on it that I want to move to the primary
hard drive in my 600m.  It is a bootable hard drive that has RHEL 3.0
installed on it and comes from a Dell Inspiron 8000 laptop.

I've checked in the BIOS on my 600m and it identifies the media bay hard
drive as a modular bay hdd.  So, the BIOS seems to know what is going on.
I've tried multiple things with the boot order including most recently
having the primary hdd first in the boot order and the only bootable
device enabled - all with the same exact results.  Also, in the boot
process, it is clear that I am starting out booting FC3 rather than RHEL3.

I've noticed that /etc/fstab seems to get written during the boot process
to reflect the device installed in the media bay.  When I have my CDRW/DVD
combo drive installed, then fstab has an entry for it as a noauto,ro device.
If I boot up with the battery in the media bay, there is no CDRW entry in
fstab.  I never get booted with the second hdd so don't know what it would
say.

I'm wondering if part of the problem has to do with this second hard drive
being bootable even though I have presumably kept it from being booted from
in the BIOS.

The main reason I have been going through this exercise is so I can transfer
a bunch of files ( 10-30 GBs worth ) from my older computer to the newer
one.  I don't have the CD burner working on my old laptop.  I don't have
wireless working on my new laptop yet.  Lately, I've been wondering if I
could just connect the two laptops together into a private 2 machine
network and copy files from one to the other efficiently that way.  I'm
not sure how to do this but maybe it would be simple.  What do you think?

Then maybe later I could figure out how to plug and play with devices in
the media bay - which is something that I would like to be able to do.

>> Something which I read in a book talked about possibly having to do
>> something to a harddrive to make it a slave drive if it was going to
>> be a second data drive.  I don't know if that applies to my situation.
>
> Hm, maybe, but most laptops I have seen have two IDE channels
> and have the hard drive on the primary channel and the optical
> drive (plug) on the secondary channel.  I have a media bay
> hard drive caddy around -- I will give a try when I get a
> chance (never used one before).
>
> I wonder if you install the drive and go into BIOS setup if
> both disks are detected and identified properly?  Do they list
> as primary and secondary master devices?

See above.

> --
> Gary Sandine <gars at laclinux.com>
>
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-- 
Dave Nystrom
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