Hard Drive issues

[jazzhat]

OK. I've installed a new Western Digital 120 GB HDD in my computer. Now that it is recognized by the BIOS (another, long story related to the fact that I'm cheap and Compaq makes poor computers), I can get the computer to boot again with the existing hard drive. Kubuntu begins to start up nicely. Until it tries to mount the root filesystem. At that point, it hangs up and gives me an alert:

/dev/hdb1 does not exist.

Dropping toa shell! BusyBox v1.01 (Debian 1:1.01-4ubuntu3) Built-in shell (ash)

This makes me think I've dropped into the ash shell, but I'm not entirely sure, nor am I sure what to do from there. Anyone have any ideas? I am relatively new to linux, though I know my fair share about computers and am in fact getting pretty good with the command line when I need to use it.

[lec2004]

Re: Hard Drive issues

how old is your compaq? Compaq appears to be finicky with hardware. Have you tried starting the desktop using "startx"? have you formated the drive? try using a live cd and sees what happens. You can also make sure the jumpers are set correctly as I take it this is a slave drive. There have been times I did not notice the jumper diagram was in 3D so I got the jumper on the opposite side.

Another thing you can try is putting the new hard drive as the master on the primary controller. Also make sure the bios is set to auto detect for the secondary controller.