[SOLVED] Second internal hard drive not usable

Hello,

I just started with Zorin 9 yesterday, most of the things work fine. But there is my problem :
Even if the second hard drive inside my laptop has been formated to only one ext4 primary partition, with a tag "HDD" and a new UUID, i cannot write anything inside (cannot instal steam games in it or even create a folder), steam says me it can't use this location because it's read-only.

Thanks for reading

Hi, was this in use on another system at one point? Did you format it completely before using it?

Swarfendor437 wrote:Hi, was this in use on another system at one point? Did you format it completely before using it?

Hi, the two drives in my laptop had windows 7 before zorin 9, but I completely format both of the drives, using gparted for the second drive.

Go to your [ Bios ] Settings and see if there is anything that can be change relative to that second drive.

My monster HP Notebook... I had to go towards [ Bios ] to make changes for things to work right.

Usually this can be done under [ Security Settings ]

Reagrds
Gizzy



Note : It helps to know your Make / Model Notebook.

Ok, I'll try to see in the bios. My laptop is a HP EliteBook 8560w, with the cd-drive removed for a extension bay for a 500 Gb HDD. the first drive is a 120 Gb SSD.

EDIT : even if I've been able to log in the bios, most of the options are greyed, dont know why though. But when I see after the bios the zorin pre-start screen (zorin, memtest, etc) I see something strange, the last line offer me to boot windows from the second drive sdb1 , but both of my drives have been completely formatted for Zorin.
But in both of these locations, I havent found anything about my problem.

I have three in my closet and one I use for school [ Elitebook 6500 ] Intel i5.
The Elitebook was on the back of my mind.... when looking over your thread this morning.
Very good Notebooks.
I picked them up at a surplus auction I always attend.
Not bad for $ 150.00 a piece [ USD ] !!!!

Hi, there is something new : when I start the computer or try to mount the second drive from "files", I get this error message

Kiddoomer Did you by any chance notice the second drive when installing ZOS9 !!!!

Gizmuntu wrote:Kiddoomer Did you by any chance notice the second drive when installing ZOS9 !!!!

Yes, before the installation I went into the "manual install Zorin" menu, and I was able to see the two drives.

I'm not sure about it, but it seems the problem is about fstab or root access, like the drive would only be writable by the root user.

Do us a favor...Use Gparted and take a screenshot of all your partitions including drives.
And post it here !!!!

Later when I get time [ Home ] ..will look see at exactly what you have brewing in the background.
Swarfendor might come online in the my lapse to help you get sorted out.

Here it is :

Kiddoomer

If you have done so.....yet......use thew disk utility in Zorin Menu > Preference ...and reformat to either FAT32 or NTFS.
And let us know the outcome.

I started to reformat it in FAT, but is a 15.5 Mo/s speed normal ? It would take nearly 9 hours to do it.

Quick Format = 7s will do ya !!!!

Done it, now I can mount without problems the disk. I tried after that to install a steam game in it, but it fails with this message :

In english : The new steam folder must be in a installed files system (mounted) with execution permissions." but steam managed to create in it a empty folder named SteamApps

Hello, when I launched my computer today, I have seen the option to start windows on the second drive (sdb1) on the Zorin start screen (between the bios and the desktop appareance). Is it normal ?

Edit : from all the forum/guide/wiki that I have read, my guess is that the problem could be with this /etc/fstab thing

Sorry for the triple post, but I found a solution to my problem : I entered this in the terminal : sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /media/HDD
and then I was able to install my steam games in the drive and create folder in it.

Check this out, I had an error close to this earlier today, and in my case it happened to be something to do with the way I started the xserver on my computer, here is hat I did to resolve the issue for myself.

1. Step one, determine your drive names.

Code:

dmesg | egrep "sd[a-z]: "

This should show something like this
"[ 2.524383] sda: sda1 sda2"
what this tells me is there is one drive with 2 partitions.
(sdb would be the second drive, and sdc would be the third etc, in my case I only)

2. ensure the drive is not mounted.

Code:

sudo umount /dev/sda1
sudo umount /dev/sda2

3. make a mount location.

Code:

mkdir /mnt/sda1
mkdir /mnt/sda2

4. mount the drives

Code:

sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1
sudo mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/sda2

Then you should be able to read and write to the drives and partitions. =]
If you get an error something allong the lines of "need filesystem type", then you should try a few different FS types while mounting they can be specified using the "-t" option some common ones I would suggest trying are "fat32, ext2, ext3, ntfs".
which would look something like this.

Code:

sudo mount -t ext2 /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1

Please note, in most cases, your drive is not going to be sda, I'm running off a live disk at the moment, so my only HDD is sda... yours is more likely sdb or sdc... =] Hope this helps.

Thanks, that worked perfectly. There is just one thing, I have in /mnt a second folder named with a UUID I think, and some previous "drive link" folder in my /media (some failed attempts to make the drive sbb1 to work) . They dont cause problem but should I remove them ?

If it is in /media that is just where the system auto mounts to normally.
usually it will be something like /media/$USER/<driveUUIDgoesHERE>

If they are showing up there, then your system is likely mounting them for you, after you mount them where you want them you should be able to edit your fstab and that will stop your system for generating places to mount them for you.

the file is at
/etc/fstab
and you will likely need to add something like this

Code:

/dev/sda2 /mnt/sda2 auto defaults 0 0

where it is the "device" "mount location" "fstype" "options" and the "dump-frequency" and "pass-number"

Hope this helps.

Linx wrote:If it is in /media that is just where the system auto mounts to normally.
usually it will be something like /media/$USER/<driveUUIDgoesHERE>

If they are showing up there, then your system is likely mounting them for you, after you mount them where you want them you should be able to edit your fstab and that will stop your system for generating places to mount them for you.

the file is at
/etc/fstab
and you will likely need to add something like this

Code:

/dev/sda2 /mnt/sda2 auto defaults 0 0

where it is the "device" "mount location" "fstype" "options" and the "dump-frequency" and "pass-number"

Hope this helps.

Excellent, thank you there was just in my computer "/dev/by-label (or by-UUID) /HDD (label of my drive)" and that was it the topic can be close I suppose.