[SOLVED] mounting external ubuntu hard disk problem

[Jussarian]

Hi

May I please get some help reading an externally mounted Ubuntu formatted hard disk from within an installation of Wubi?

Long story short for 'Why?', I downloaded some software to my Ubuntu 9.04 PC for moderating the screen brightness at night ("f.lux" by stereopsis), but it actually stopped all output from the PC to the monitor. I've gotten no assistance about the particular software, so my best option now is to extract all my data from the PC's hard disk, then do a fresh install of ubuntu on it.

To that end, I've got an IDE/SATA adaptor that connects the disk and my laptop via USB; and I've installed Wubi (Ubuntu 10.04) on my XP laptop so that there are identical OS's at both ends.

I've *partially* mounted the disk from Wubi, using
sudo mount /dev/sda2 /media/mynewdrive
and in both Nautilus and PCMan I can see some files on the disk. I can view 3 folders: BIN; I386; Planfolder; and several files.

What I want to find, of course, is /home/justin but it does not appear.

How do I do that please? (I've already looked in the various threads here about external HDD's, nothing seems directly relevant though.)

Thanks in advance!

Justin

[Jussarian]

Some extra data FYI is below. (Couldn''t include above because this editor thought there was a URL in it...) Seeing that dev/sda2 is a "hidden W95 FAT32" kind, I'm not sure if that is my ubuntu disk - maybe it is my windows disk on this laptop? I thought Ubuntu was ext3.

Disk: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10

input:
sudo fdisk -l
output:
Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x27e4403a

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 18935 152095356 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 18936 19457 4192965 1c Hidden W95 FAT32 (LBA)

input:
sudo lshw -C disk
output:
*-disk
description: ATA Disk
product: Hitachi HTS54161
vendor: Hitachi
physical id: 0.0.0
bus info: scsi@2:0.0.0
logical name: /dev/sda
version: SB4O
serial: SB2441GJJ29R1E
size: 149GiB (160GB)
capabilities: partitioned partitioned:dos
configuration: ansiversion=5 signature=27e4403a
*-disk
description: SCSI Disk
physical id: 0.0.0
bus info: scsi@5:0.0.0
logical name: /dev/sdb

input:
df -h
output:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/loop0 17G 2.4G 13G 16% /
none 996M 316K 996M 1% /dev
none 1001M 196K 1001M 1% /dev/shm
none 1001M 96K 1001M 1% /var/run
none 1001M 0 1001M 0% /var/lock
none 1001M 0 1001M 0% /lib/init/rw
/dev/sda1 146G 38G 108G 26% /host
none 17G 2.4G 13G 16% /var/lib/ureadahead/debugfs
/dev/sda2 4.0G 3.7G 396M 91% /media/mynewdrive

[Jussarian]

and attached here is what I can see in the disk at the moment. How do I get /home?

[Kloschüssel]

Why do you mount sda2 when the external disk is sdb?

[Jussarian]

Why do you mount sda2 when the external disk is sdb?

OK, thank you for clearing that up for me. I just tried to mount sdb to a new directory I made, got this message back:

justin@ubuntu:~$ sudo mount /dev/sdb /media/myolddrive
mount: you must specify the filesystem type

How do I specify that it is (I presume) ext3?

[Kloschüssel]

fdisk did not list sdb or its partitions, so I have to assume there is no filesystem on sdb. If it is new it would be not that uncommon. So, if you know there is no data on that external drive, partition it. Then mount will also work without the need to specifiy the filesystem type cause it gets automatically detected.

[Jussarian]

Thanks Kloschussel (can't do umlauts ATM sorry), but that is the problem right there: there is a lot of data on that disk which I want to retrieve. It is the hard disk of my desktop, with Ubuntu 9.04 installed. I need to get all my data out of /home.

[Kloschüssel]

Then something like:

mount /dev/sdb
mount /dev/sdb0
mount /dev/sdb1
mount /dev/sdb2
mount /dev/sdb3
mount /dev/sdb4
mount /dev/sdb..

should do the job. If it is some strange filesystem type, you may need to specify the filesystem type with the -t switch.

[devils casper]

Execute sudo blkid command in Terminal and post output here.

sudo blkid

[Jussarian]

Somehow this has come right almost despite what I have tried. I can access the hard disk through Wubi now easily, where two days ago I could not.

What I tried yesterday was a couple of Windows programs for accessing ext2/3 systems. The Ext2 Installable File System For Windows didn't work, nor did DiskInternals Linux Reader. I didn't think the DiskInternals Linux Recovery was working either - it just spent a lot of time scanning the disk, only to tell me that the disk is empty (which is the result the other 2 programs came up with, and our investigations through Wubi until now too).

However last night I left Linux Recovery to scan the partitions of the drive. When I checked this morning it had (possibly interacting with the 2am virus-scan) frozen my laptop - not good I thought. But I started Wubi to run Devil Casper's command, plugged the hard disk in and...voila! there is my file system, and my good old /home! I have no idea what exactly fixed it, but needless to say I have now backed everything up.

Execute sudo blkid command in Terminal and post output here.

sudo blkid

Anyway, FYI here are the results:

/dev/loop0: UUID="372f0fa6-9b67-410c-a96f-4293602d25b9" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/sda1: LABEL="S3A6253D002" UUID="D0ACD885ACD8678C" TYPE="ntfs"
/dev/sda2: LABEL="HDDRECOVERY" UUID="58D9-3E0C" TYPE="vfat"
/dev/sdb1: UUID="dc0bb08f-0a69-47a4-a09f-8e80f4592aca" TYPE="ext3"
/dev/sdb5: UUID="79e74ef6-8670-475a-906b-5459d248efa2" TYPE="swap"

Thank you both very much for your time and interest.