Hi there
i was writing data to one of my hard drives and the program crashed (amule). i rebooted my machine as it was running slow and now it wont mount my hard drive..... i get an error message saying
"unable to mount /dev/hdf1 : Can't read superblock"

now as im a bit of a n00b when it comes to linux i dont know what to do... on some of the other threads ive searched it said to do a file system check, but when im in a console it says "fsck :command not found"

this is all on Mandrake 10.1 community edition btw.

any help that can be given would be great... would like to get the 150gb of data back...

cheers
Sam J

You have corruptions on your disk, the best way to check it is by booting into your mandrake cd (install disk) and using the utilities on there to check it. So, once you have booted the mandrake cd, press CTRL+ALT+F2 (F1 - F6 are your text mode terminals and should all be useable, I just always go for F2, or F6 if F2 is not available). From there you should be able to log in as root, type in "man fsck" and get the manual page. If you can't get the man page then just try "fsck" and you should see a "usage" message.

First of all you need to know or find out where your corrupt partition(s) is(are), run something like "fsck -y /dev/hda1" (where hda1 is the first partition of hda (usually "C" in windows) and -y means fix automatically (generally safe)). Try different combinations of hda, hdb, hdc and hdd - hda# is the most likely though (primary master disk).

Bad superblocks can be recovered but I have only ever had to do that with "ufs" on solaris machines, you most likely use ext2, ext3 or reiserfs.

right, went into the rescue disk, tried to run fsck, but again came back as command not found... if i run LSPARTS under the rescue disk it returns

hdf1: 156,319 MBytes, type <0xffffffff> (unknown)

is there any way i can download the fsck tool?

Before we try something else, try running "/sbin/fsck".... also, try any other linux disks you may have, eg. mandrake disk2 or suse disks

right... managed to run fsck through /sbin/fsck... and this is the output i got..

[code[
/sbin/fsck /dev/hdf1

fsck 1.35 (28-Feb-2004)
fsck: fsck.vfat: not found
/sbin/fsck: Error 2 while executing fsck.vfat for /dev/hdf1[/code]

can anyone tell me what this means? is it saying that there is no recognised file system on there? and if so is there ay way to recover it or am i fooked?

cheers
Sam J

Ah, fsck can't scan a fat32 filesystem, you will need to scan it under windows (using scandisk). If windows isn't installed then you can always plop your hard disk into a machine that does run windows, then scan it.