[SOLVED] Recovering data / transferring hard disk

[bratboy]

Hi,

I need to recover some data from a hard disk. The power supply died on one machine, so I tried adding the hard disk as a secondary drive on another machine. I'm a little at a loss, though, on how I should mount it - obviously, I want to be careful not to reformat or repartition it, but the system doesn't recognize the drive's presence.

The system which died was Fedora Core 9. The machine I moved it to is Fedora Core 5.

Alternatively, I could try booting the system with the FC9 drive, but the hardware is different enough between the two mcahines that that seems a bit unwise.

Any thoughts?

Thanks!

-Dan

[L4Linux]

Just make a Live-CD or Live-USB of a modern distro, like Ubuntu 9.04 or Mandriva and boot your PC with it. The hdd should be mounted by default, so you can copy its contents to a USB-Disk or through network.
If it doesn't post again.

Generally, to mount a hdd, type
sudo fdisk -l

It will show you your hard disks. Identify the one you want(from size and filesystem). You will see something like:
Device
/dev/sda1 * 1 7649 61440561 7 HPFS/NTFS
....
/dev/sda7 30597 33077 19928601 83 Linux

If you want to mount the Linux partition, create a folder in /home for example, let's say "diks1". Then type:
mount /dev/sda7 /home/disk1

But modern distros should automount it.

[bratboy]

Would this be different from booting the system normally using its old hard disk? Or is the problem FC5?

Incidentally, sudo fdisk -l only shows the partitions of the primary hard disk.

/dev/sda1 * 1 13 103491 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 14 9726 78019672+ 8e Linux LVM

[L4Linux]

Is the hard disk recognized in the BIOS?

[Rubberman]

It's possible that the power supply took out the hard drive when it failed. It isn't uncommon for them to spike voltage, or worse, amperage when they turn toes up. What I usually do in a case like this is plug it into an external USB enclosure and attach that to the system. First off, it's safer for your system since it isn't directly connected to the system board and power supply. Secondly, you can plug it into any number of systems for analysis. If they don't see it then you can be pretty sure it is a door stop. That said, the drive electronics can be toast, but your data can still be recovered, often by the disc drive manufacturer (most of them have recovery services) or from a data recovery service. If your data is mission critical, so to speak, that might be a necessary expense.

[bratboy]

OK, good news is that it looks like the problem is that the BIOS needed to be told about the hard drive. Bad news is that it doesn't seem to want to mount. When I try, it wants me to specify the filesystem type. However, it appears that fc9 is all sparkly and new with ext4, which the old system (being fc5) doesn't understand. Would a thumb drive with Ubuntu get me through this? Or should I upgrade my old system to FC9, then try again?

Thanks for all the help!

[Rubberman]

Ah! I need to read the postings more closely! I missed that you were moving the disc from FC9 to FC5, but then you didn't say that it was an ext4 file system, which indeed FC5 cannot recognize, and I don't think the ext4 drivers will work with it (kernel is too old). You should be able to use an FC10 liveCD, mount the drive you want to recover, and another drive that will hold the data, then copy the files over, or create a tarball on the target drive containing the ext4 file system contents. Not difficult to do, and then your data would be available on the FC5 system. In any case, that would seem to be a reasonable plan to me.

[bratboy]

Thanks to everyone for the help. The solution ultimately was to
1) make sure the drive was showing up in the BIOS
2) create a thumbdrive live USB using liveusb-creator
3) mount the drive

I had some more problems in step 3, but Google was very helpful (search for "unknown filesystem lvm2pv").

Thanks again to everyone for their help!

(apologies for not including links, but evidently I'm not allowed until I've posted at least 15 messages in the forum)