remnants of raid?

[MrCat]

Hi folks

I'm getting very frustrated trying to get Mint to recognise my three hd's as three hd's! One it recognises fine, but instead of a list of three drives on the 'allocate drive space' window I get:

/dev/mapper/hpt37x_dbbicafeae
free space 80040mb
/dev/sda
free space 40020mb

I did some reading up but could only find some jargon wasn't so familiar with and that there may be some residue of an old raid array I used to have on the two drives tho they've supposedly been reformatted. I also ad a recomendation of getting openSuse 'gnome' which would recognise any lingering elements of said raid aray and sort things out but sadly some of the settings were a bit beyond me and despite trying my best I got nowhere even tho Gnome could see the 3 drives and lovingly promised to format them. It also showed that dev/mapper thing elsewhere which appears to be unremovable...

Any help would be totally fabulous, I'd just love for mint to see my three drives and use them as three separate entities so I can start playing around properly

Cheers
Mr C

[yancek]

I can't really tell from your post what your intentions are?
You want GParted on Mint to recognize your drives so you can play around with them??
What exactly did you have in mind? Are you planning to install Mint to one of the drives? Do you have any other operating systems on any of these drives? Do you have all three drives attached while you are doing whatever it is your are trying to do?

I would suggest you open a terminal after boot the Mint CD, and run the following command to get drive/partition information to post here:

sudo fdisk -l (that is a lower case Letter L in the command)

Does the message you refer to above appear in the main window of the Allocate Drive Space window. On the first Allocate Drive Space window, which selection to you choose:

Install Alongside Other operating systems,
Use entire disk or,
Specify partitions manually?

Providing this information would be a good start.

[MrCat]

Thanks for the reply, ok here goes.

The intention: simply install and run mint
I'm starting from scratch with my freshly wiped machine, no other operating systems or anything on it, not even a sausage, just 3 hd's and a dvd drive (all plugged in whilst installing).

It was when I clicked 'specify partitions manually' that I got;

/dev/mapper/hpt37x_dbbicafeae
free space 80040mb
/dev/sda
free space 40020mb

...however, I just went ahead and installed mint on dev/sda after making 3 partitions on it as I saw on a youtube vid. One 10ish GB with a mount point '/', one 1.5gb (roughly 2.5 times physical ram I was recomended) for a swap area, and then the rest of the drive with a mount point of '/home'. I hoped that despite the install bit telling me I had an 80gb raid array I could iron this out with Gparted or something once mint was installed. I want the drives seperate so I have the freedom to remove one without messing up stuff on it or the other drive it's somehow linked to right now.

"sudo fdisk -l" gives me;

Disk /dev/sda: 40.0 GB, 40020664320 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4865 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000964c7

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 1459 11717632 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 1460 4866 27362305 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 1460 1654 1561600 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6 1654 4866 25799680 83 Linux

Disk /dev/sdb: 40.0 GB, 40020664320 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4865 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xee11f79f

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 1 4866 39080960 83 Linux

Disk /dev/sdc: 40.0 GB, 40020664320 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4865 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xb3bdb3bd

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdc1 1 4866 39080960 83 Linux

Disk /dev/dm-0: 80.0 GB, 80040951808 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9731 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 131072 bytes / 262144 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xee11f79f

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/dm-0p1 1 4866 39080960 83 Linux

Disk /dev/dm-1: 40.0 GB, 40018903040 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4865 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 131072 bytes / 262144 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xfafff9fa

Disk /dev/dm-1 doesn't contain a valid partition table

This seems to show all my disks as proper hd's in their own right.
Gparted shows them all seperately now too but says for dev/sdb and c 'couldn't find valid filesystem superblock'. It also says they're unmounted which I'm sure won't help. I'm also seeing up there 'dev/dm-0' 80gb so it's seeing all 3 40gb drives and also lumping two of them into an 80gb thing I just don't understand nor want.

I have tried to reformat/partition them (dev/sdb and c) but it tells me it can't do it because they're somehow being used by the system.

Basically my desire is to start up mint, click on 'computer' on the top left of the desktop and see all my drives with their fresh space just waiting to be filled with whatever, but right now all I see is;
CD/DVD
Floppy Drive
File System...

not even the rest of the space I thought I'd partitioned off on dev/sda.

Hope that makes more sense, I'm sure it's something fairly obvious and silly. How far wrong can you go with three blank drives and not a scrap of info to loose.
Cheers!

[HROAdmin26]

No, you'll need to start over for simplicity sake.

The reason you see /dev/mapper/XXX during the install should only be due to two possibilities:

1) The IDE/SATA chip is configured in some sort of RAID (set in "BIOS")
2) There is a RAID "signature" still on one or more of the disks.

Make sure that 1) is not configured. To correct 2) boot into the Mint "LiveCD" and write zero's to the beginning of the HDD's.

** This will destroy all data on the disk - use with caution. **

After booting from the Mint CD:

A) Check the drive names for the 40GB HDD's:

sudo fdisk -l

B) For each 40GB drive, type in the command below:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=10 of=/dev/sdX

* Replace X with the drive's letter.

C) Reboot and run the Mint install again.

[MrCat]

Thanks, starting over was the way to go.

Managed to reformat and install perfectly

Cheers