JIM HOLSONBACK wrote in a message to WAYNE CHIRNSIDE:

 WC> I was thinking Roy's advice might have some value in the command 
 WC> line syntax he provided but on rethinking it if fdisk /dev/hde 
 WC> doesn't see the drive his zeroing syntax won't see it either :-(

 JH> Back up top to your _first_ problem.  You'll likely not get 
 JH> anywhere until the HDD is autodetected by a BIOS attached to an IDE
 JH> controller.

Not necessarily,  linux only uses the BIOS to the extent necessary to read
the beginning of the boot device (HD or otherwise) and not thereafter.

 JH> But (and I think this is important) is "hde" the equivalent of C: 
 JH> drive? 

/dev/hda = first HD, /dev/hdb = second HD,  and so on.  For a setup where
the MB has two connectors on it that'd be a through d,  and the first one
on the plug-in card would be hde.  Which is why I was thinking that if I
wanted to use one of those cards for a performance boost I'd disable the MB
stuff,  at which point the first connector on the card should be seen as
hda and hdb,  the second as hdc and hdd,  and so forth.

Similarly (though not pertinent to what we're discussing here),  if we were
talking about SCSI devices it'd be sda, sdb,  and so forth.

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