HELP! Hard drives won't mount.

scottnic · n00b Joined: 23 Jun 2002 Posts: 18

I've been running Debian for a couple of years now and thought I'd give Gentoo a try. I had a new motherboard and stuff, so I decided to throw together a separate system to test it. The install went well, and I liked what I saw, so I decided to move the drives from my Debian install into the Gentoo box and make it permanent.

So I moved the drives over and booted the computer up. The drives show up in the boot process and there are now /dev/hdc and /dev/hdd entries.

But when I do "mount /dev/hdc /mnt/hdc" I get "wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdc, or too many mounted file systems."

I'm 99% sure the drives are ext2 (don't remember 100% because it was a long time ago), but even a "mount -t ext2 /dev/hdc /mnt/hdc" doesn't work (I get the same message).

What worries me even more is that I fired up fdisk to take a look at the partition information and there's nothing there. (no partitions listed).

The drives were working in the Debian install just a few hours ago. I haven't done anything to them other than move them from one computer to another.

I'm a little stressed out about this, because they've got quite a bit of important data on them (my wife will kill me if we lose it) and I haven't backed up for a few months (I know, I know.)

Any help would be HUGELY appreciated!

Thanks!

Jimboberella · Posted: Sun Jun 23, 2002 1:19 am Post subject:

did you mkdir /mnt/ndc first? Mount in Gentoo tries all kernel supported filesystems so it should find the partitions if they are supported.

scottnic · n00b Joined: 23 Jun 2002 Posts: 18

Yeah. I did mkdir /mnt/hdc.

More info:

I tried "Ranish Partition Manager", a dos partitioning utility -- it shows a single primary partition on each drive (the drives are both 30GB IBMs) but no partition type (i.e. not "81", etc.).

"e2fsck /dev/hdc" tells me "/dev/hdc was not cleanly unmounted, check forced" and then "free blocks count wrong for group #? (#, counted #). Fix?" (usually (0, counted <some huge number>)).

I've said "no", because I'm afraid to do anything for fear of corrupting the data irreversibly.

Any ideas?

scottnic · n00b Joined: 23 Jun 2002 Posts: 18

Okay...

I found that after running e2fsck on /dev/hdc I can mount it now, and the directories/files all appear to be there. I've "less"ed a few text files and they appear to be fine. I can't check many of the others until I get Samba up and running (so I can access them on the Windows machine).

As I mentioned previously, I answered "no" to all the multitude of "Fix?" prompts when I ran e2fsck. Should I run it again and let it fix all the errors?

garion911 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 04 Jun 2002 Posts: 88

Umm.. All your mount commands seem to be missing partition numbers... (mount /dev/hdc should be mount /dev/hdc1 or some such...) Could that be it?

Don't know about the missing partition table though.. Did you check before or after you e2fsck'ed? (again, missing a partition number..)..

scottnic · n00b Joined: 23 Jun 2002 Posts: 18

There's only one partition on each drive, and I've not had to use partition numbers in the past. (There isn't an "hdc1" in /dev, just an "hdc").

e2fsck seems to have fixed the drives somewhat -- The drives will mount now, although I still get complaints at boot. At least I can access the files, and so far haven't been able to find any corruption or anything.

I'm in the process of backing them up (60 GB of data over ethernet takes a while), and then I'll re-initialize and start over (in fact, I've got a Highpoint RAID on the new motherboard I put in, so I'll combine the two 30s into a RAID-0 60)

Thanks to all who offered suggestions and advice.