Why can't I see my new harddrive on my Ubuntu box?

I installed my new drive and put Ubuntu server on it. It was working fine except ubuntu server was a bit to raw for me. So, then I decided to go back to my old drive and use the new drive as a second drive (the old OS was still on the old drive). The old ubuntu loads fine but it cannot see the new drive. I have tried putting the second dirve in all the SATA ports I have and I can never seem to see the drive.?

I run the following command to try and reformat it:

fdisk /dev/sdb

and I get the following error:

Unable to open /dev/sdb

I do not have to set any physical pins to let it know it should be the second drive right? Its not like the old IDE days. Is there a certain order to the SATA ports on the board?

Any thoughts on this would be much appreciated...

Solution 1:

Try:

fdisk -l

To list all disks and partitions, you could also check the boot log and see if the disk is detected there.

Solution 2:

There is a certain order to the SATA ports, at least on the boards I've seen so far. The second disk might not show up as /dev/sdb but as /dev/sdc or /dev/sdd if you have 4 ports. But then, there might also be a problem with the disk itself.

Solution 3:

A crude but information rich method of checking for your drive... does going through the kernel output show your drive being listed?

dmesg | less