[newbie] Master HDD won't mount in dual-boot system

[Peter Simko]

I'm running the old Mandrake 8.2 distro on a Linux-WinXP dual boot 
machine. My hda drive consists of three partitions, all vfat and used 
for the XP side of the box. Recently (after making some hardware 
configuration changes) the Linux side has been unable to mount the hda 
drive. At first, it wasn't even listed in the /dev directory, so I 
manually created the block device nodes in 
/dev/ide0/host0/target0/bus0/lun0 using "mknod hda b 3 0" for the disk 
and "mknod hda1 b 3 1", etc for the three partitions. I then linked the 
devices back up to /dev. My problem now is that I can't mount the 
devices and keep getting "mount: /dev/hda1 is not a valid block device". 
Looking through dmesg I also get a lot of "hda: driver not present" 
warnings, even though the BIOS is definitely seeing the drive. Anyone 
know how I can make my hda drive mountable again?


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