... wrong major or minor number ... on my IBM laptop

[IngmarAtNetikus]

I am no linux expert - actually do have very little knowledge about it. I am pretty good with the WinNT stuff, so still learning linux. Linux Mandrake here is installed on IBM Thinkpad T20 laptop. It has a so called ultraport where I can either put in a floppy drive or DVD cdrom. At this point I'm trying to get a floppy running.

Since I have no bootdisk (I couldn't create it during the boot because I had the CDROM in the bay) I am booting with an MSDOS floppy first and executing loadlin. This is because I messed up during the installation of lilo and specified hda5 instead of hda as the destination.

Anyway, when the system boots it gives me the first error message:

/dev/hda1 has wrong major or minor number

I read a little bit and found that IDE drives should have a major number of 3 and a minor number according to their hdax number. Well, I don't know how I can influence that or fix it!

If I run mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy I get the same error message. My floppy is being accessed but then the message "/dev/fd0 has wrong major ..." comes up.


I ran the following commandos:

1. cat /proc/devices

Character devices 
1 mem 
2 pty 
3 ttyp 
4 tty0 
5 console 
7 rcs 
10 misc 
29 fb 
162 raw 

Block devices 
1 ramdisk 
2 fd 
3 ide0 
9 md

<Are those the minor numbers?>

2. cat /proc/filesystems

      filesystems 
nodev proc

3. cat /etc/fstab

<I skipped the ones I think are not important ...>

/dev/hda1 /mnt/DOS_hda1 vfat user,exec,conv=auto 0 0 
/dev/fd0 /floppy auto sync,user,noauto,nosuid,nodev,unhide 0 0

Does anybody have any suggestions?
[sig][/sig]

 

[sandrewz]

well, since it's a fresh new install, you may want to go back in and reinstall drake. Get drake 7.1, it has an awesome boot loader known as grub, and can see different hdd. [sig][/sig]

 

[IngmarAtNetikus]

I already solved the problem myself by booting from the HD and not with a dos bootdisk and loadlin. [sig][/sig]

 

[drhenry]

I've seen this error before, and the news isn't pretty ....
Chances are pretty strong that you have a hard drive that's LINUX unfriendly. Which means, hey sure, can install, can run, but nothing but grey hairs when
A. Attempting to run a partition SW package for a dual boot, or
B. Attempting to mount a DOS/WIN9X drive on your linux partition (/dev/hda1, /dev/hdb1, etc.). Sorry. Hope I'm wrong, but been there done that. Floppies? Good luck.