[buug] IDE drive recognition

[Michael Paoli]

Some things to try/examine ...

What if you drop the trailing slash (/) on the directory
mount point on the mount(8) command and/or make it consistent
between mount(8) command and /etc/fstab.

Do you get the same results if the mount(8) command gives
the filesystem device, but not the mount point? ... or
the mount point (with or without the trailing slash) without the
filesystem device?

How about strace(1)?  Might want to run strace(1) on the mount(8)
command that fails, saving the strace output via -o option to a file,
... might want to then do similarly with a mount that works fine and
without problems, and compare and contrast the strace(1) output of the
two (may or may not catch anything particularly definitive since
mount(2) does much of the work, however where things diverge in
behavior and/or specific error return or mode of failure may
further isolate the problem).

You can also comment out the related /etc/fstab entry(/ies)
and explicitly give mount(1) the relevant options and arguments
(that at least avoids any potential conflicts with /etc/fstab entries).

If you're able to read/write the partition (e.g. create and verify
the filesystem), and the partition is of the correct type, and
the kernel is aware of the partition (did you check /proc/partitions?
have you been through at least one reboot (to cover the bases - there
may be less disruptive ways) since
the last change of partitioning?), and nothing else particularly strange
is happening with access or open condition of the filesystem/partition
or the mount point, it would then seem something at least
slightly funky is happening with the mount attempt.

references:
http://www.weak.org/pipermail/buug/2004-November/date.html