how to mount old harddrive for data retrieval?

[schwim]

Hi there everyone,

Every year or so, I upgrade my OS(Fedora) and I'm installing 9 right now. The way I do it is I remove the old drive, install a replacement drive then install the OS. This way, in the event of a catastrophe, I simply swap drives and have my old OS back.

What I would like to do if possible is this: Once the new OS is up and running, I would like to plug the old drive back in and retrieve all of the necessary files off of it(email, work, docs, etc.).

What's the easiest method of doing this? How would I go about mounting a second drive that's not part of the file system?

thanks,
json

[Jonathan183]

I think the easiest way is to use something like PartedMagic, this will easily allow you to mount the hard drives as root and copy the information across. You can then just chown the data once you remove the old drive and restart Fedora.

I think Fedora uses label= to identify partitions so you should make sure the partition labels do not match eg don't use / and /home for both hard drives if you intend starting Fedora with both drives in the system.

[devils casper]

What's the easiest method of doing this? How would I go about mounting a second drive that's not part of the file system?

Its very easy unless you are using LVMs. Plug-in Second disk as Slave/Secondary. Boot up Fedora 9 and execute fdisk -l command. Note down device names assigned to the partitions of Second Disk.
Create mount_point ( folder ) for each partition and execute mount command to mount partition.
Let say, /dev/sdb1 is first partition of Second disk and its formatted in ext3 filesystem.
Execute this

su -
mkdir /media/sdb1
mount  -t  ext3   /dev/sdb1   /media/sdb1
ls /media/sdb1

In case you have any confusion, post the output of fdisk -l command here.

[schwim]

Thanks very much for the replies guys, however I'll be saving the information for use at a later date.

Let's hope 10 is a worthwhile release.

thanks,
json