I'm new to dsl but I have found its one of the easiest distros to mount hard drives with the auto-mount feature. On all my pc's at home the mount feature works great and they mount as hda1. Now when I go to my school which the standard computer is the new dell's which dont have the ps/2 ports and the keyboard and mouse are hooked up through usb. On other distros of linux eigther the mouse or the keyboard or both doesnt work. On dsl the mouse and keyboard works fine but when im looking for the attached devices with the auto mount program it shows cd, floppy and this device called "0". I took for granted that was the hard drive but aparently it wasnt becuase it says the device is being used by another process when I try to mount it. There are no other devices show like on my other pc when it shows hda and sba or something like that for my usb pen. I was told by a friend that the new dells mount there hard drives differently and don't use the ide type of wiring. I'm not sure if its true but has anyone ever solved this problem before?

-Dr. Bush

By the way the exact model of the computer is the Dell Optiplex GX280.

are you sure it's not using SATA drives

where the drives might be 'sda1' etc.

what's /etc/fstab looking like?

I have the same problem on a Dell Dimension 3100. It has a SATA harddisk, but DSL doesn't recognize it...

hmm,

my laptop has a sata drive and that works with DSL, as far as i remember. i'll verify that later. as i'm curious now.

that's dsl 2.1

I tried dsl 2.0 and knoppix 3.7, no luck (then again, these aren't very recent). If I understand correctly each hardware vendor has its own type of SATA and some give trouble with linux, others don't. If I have time, I'll try slackware with the sata.i kernel. If that works, I'll compare with the dsl kernel config.

okasy.

when you load up DSL one of the boot options is "dsl sata"

press F3 to see it.

this loads a sata kernel module. dont know it that will work 100% but give it a try.....

I believe that if you check the Optiplex 280 only supports SATA hard disks. I had a broken one here at one time and had looked up the specifications. So Satanet appears to have your answer.

There is an IDE cable but it is for the CD/DVD. BTW, you would not want to put a hard hisk on that cable with the CD unless you want the hard disk to perform like a CD

be cautious with the sata boot option - my laptop has a sata drive and it works fine with the normal kernel..... but doesn't work with the dsl sata option....

So I tried dsl-2.2, with and without boot option sata and in both cases neither my usb keyboard nor my usb mouse was detected! I also tried install option but as soon as I hit enter the keyboard ceases to work. All I could do was pull the plug :-( dsl-2.0 did recognize my keyboard and mouse...

Finally I installed slackware 10.2 with the sata.i kernel and no problemo.

personally i view dsl as a brilliant distro. but at 50mb i don't get upset with it if not all hardware doesn't work. i think it's amazing how much actually does work!

I agree, just a little upset because something which used to work with dsl 2.0 is no longer working with 2.2
Nothing exotic about a usb mouse and keyboard... Guess I'll have to wait for the next version.