7. Troubleshooting

Many problems can be solved by a simple structured approach, analysing the symptoms, finding the cause and determining the solution. The following is an excerpts from the Multi Disk HOWTO.

7.1 During Installation

Locating Disks

Symptoms

Cannot find disk

Problem

How to find what drive letter corresponds to what disk/partition

Solution

Remember Linux does not use drive letters but device names. More information can be found in section "Drive names".

Symptoms

Cannot partition disk

Problem

Most likely wrong input to the command line for fdisk or similar tool.

Solution

Remember to use /dev/hda rather than just hda. Also do not use numbers behind hda, those indicate partitions.

Formatting

Symptoms

Cannot format disk.

Problem

Strictly speaking you format partitions not disks.

Solution

Make sure you add the partition number after the device name of the disk, for instance /dev/hda1 to the command line.