e2fsck & mounted partition

[magic-chef]

Thanks to both of you for the correction. I will try mounting it now.

BTW, what did you think about sda3 having "Amoeba" as the system type?

[magic-chef]

I tried to mount sda1 as follows:

mount /dev/sda1 /mount/sda1

Mount: you must specify the filesystem type

??

[Rubberman]

If you don't specify a file system type to mount, then an entry for that device must exist in /etc/fstab. Booting from a liveCD or recovery disc will not mount the hard drive, so it is likely that this would happen to you. Try this: mount -t ext3 /dev/sda1 /mnt/mydisc
Then see if you have any errors. Normally, a boot drive will have 3 or 4 partitions for Linux. The first one usually is /boot, the second is either the swap space or /, and which ever the second partition was (/dev/sda2), the third will be the other type. You cannot mount swap in the normal manner, but trying to will likely give an error from mount. The fourth (if it exists - /dev/sda4) would likely be /home.

FWIW, on my system the boot drive is organized this way:

/boot - /dev/sda1
swap - /dev/sda2
/ - /dev/sda3
/home - /dev/sdb1, /dev/sdc1, /dev/sdd1, /dev/sde1 - I'm using LVM to create a single logical 2TB disc for /home from these 4 500GB discs.

[magic-chef]

........Try this: mount -t ext3 /dev/sda1 /mnt/mydisc
Then see if you have any errors. .......

mount -t ext3 /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda

output is:

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock, on /dev/sda1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try dmesg | tail or so

I tried dmesg

dmesg | tail

output of last line

.............
VFS: Can't find ext3 file system on dev sda1

[Rubberman]

Provide us with the disc device listings from /dev: ls /dev/hd* /dev/sd*

Thanks.

[magic-chef]

The /dev/hd* directory did not exist.

/dev/ contained the following:

sda, sda1, sda2, sda3, sdb, sdb1, sdc

[Rubberman]

The /dev/hd* directory did not exist.

/dev/ contained the following:

sda, sda1, sda2, sda3, sdb, sdb1, sdc

That means that you have 2 drives. One has 3 partitions, the other has 1. You can see what the partitions are with the command: fdisk -l /dev/sda /dev/sdb
Please provide that information.

[magic-chef]

The following was output. I did not repeat the disk/track info because I can mount and read sdb.

I also ran the fdisk -l command and received the following info:

Disk /dev/sda: 160 GB,
255 Heads, 62 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280

Device Boot Start end blocks ID System
/dev/sda1 * 1 2432 19535008+ 83 Linux

/dev/sba2 2433 2675 1951897+ 82 Linux Swap / Solaris

/dev/sda3 2676 19457 134801415 93 Amoeba


Snip{disk and track info}


/dev/sdb1 1 38913 312568641 83 Linux



This was hand typed so I apologize for any spelling errors in advanced. Also, the line breaks in the list above we added for clarity.

[Rubberman]

From what I can find out, the Amoeba tag on /dev/sda3 might be a remnant of a confused Windows boot. Anyway, /dev/sda1 should be your /boot device - it could be an ext2 file system, or other. It shows as a Linux file system, which could mean ext2, ext3, reiser, or other. /dev/sda2 is your swap space - don't worry about that. /dev/sda3 is likely your root / partition. /dev/sdb1 is likely /home, so try mounting those two to get your data.

[magic-chef]

Well, Ive had the first good fortune so far. The partition "sda3" which is reporting as "Amoeba" filesystem type can be mounted and read (this was my home directory and has all the data that I need)!!!

A couple of questions:

1) Should I try to repair the system area (sda1) or just re-install the system and re-format sda1 & sda2, leaving sda3 alone?

2) If #1 is solution how do I handle the "Amoeba" filesystem issue? See above posts.

In closing, thanks to all for the help! I tried other forums and this is the only forum where I received any meaningful help.

This is not the end...but, I think I might be able to see it from here.