Installation--what's hdc & where is it?

[BillM]

Hi,

I'm making progress with the Knoppix 3.8.1 installation. I can now
see my systemless hdd on the KDE desktop and a few files left behind
when the disk was wiped.

The 4 Gig hdd shows up as three partitions: hda1, hda5 and hda6. I've
made them writable.

I run knoppix-installer from the console and it tells me the hard disk
is unprepared, and would I like it to partition the disk. I tell it OK,
and up comes:

Warning: Unable to open /UNIONFS/dev/hdc/ read-write (Read-only
file system).
/UNIONFS/dev/hdc has been opened read only.

At the same time, QTParted is launched. It detects my hda partitions and
how much space they contain. It also gives a report on the hdc partition (686 MB).

So...where do I find hdc? Once I've made it writable, will the installer
be able to continue?

Thanks for your advice!

--Bill

[budman7]

hdc is the 2nd primary hard drive.
To make it writable, right-click on it in Knoppix. That will bring up a menu where you will see the option for mounting it with write permissions.

[drakebasher]

Most setups have 2 IDE connectors on the motherboard, each of which can support up to 2 devices: hard drive, CD/DVD or Zip drive. The 2 devices on each IDE channel will be identified as either master or slave according to your jumper settings and, in the case of jumpers set to "cable-select", according to which ribbon cable connector the drive is connected to. So you can potentially have 4 IDE devices. Windows calls your first hard drive C:\ no matter whether it is master or slave and no matter which IDE channel it is on. Linux identifies devices based on where they are connected like so:

hda master device on primary channel
hdb slave device on primary channel
hdc master device on secondary channel
hdd slave device on secondary channel

As you can see, it's best if Linux users don't abbreviate their "Hard Disk Drive" as "hdd" unless of course it is /dev/hdd

Usually, the first CDROM is called /dev/cdrom, but if it is an IDE device, /dev/cdrom is just a symbolic link to the actual drive designation. So it is possible that /dev/cdrom -->/dev/hdc

[BillM]

Usually, the first CDROM is called /dev/cdrom, but if it is an IDE device, /dev/cdrom is just a symbolic link to the actual drive designation. So it is possible that /dev/cdrom -->/dev/hdc

Yep that's it. I can see the CD drive as the secondary master in the BIOS setup page. Thanks! --Bill