Mounted Harddrive to new computer because of blinking cursor, no filesystem found on

stricks · 07-21-2008, 09:27 PM

Hello,

I turned on my computer the other day and I got a blinking cursor with a black screen (FC6). I decided to put the harddrive into another computer so that I could turn it on, mount the drive and try and figure out what was wrong with it from there. I have done the following:

mkdir /media/hdb2
vi /etc/fstab

added:

/dev/hdb2 /media/hdb2 ext3 0 0

then

mount -a | dmesg

It saids that the ext3 file system is now found... So I loaded up LVM to see what is. I located the drive and it said that it's partition type is Linux LVM, and it's filesystem type is "No Filesystem"

The harddrive did have a filesystem on it though.

I guess the two key factors are:

Blinking cursor on boot from that hard drive and the fact that it now saids there is no filesystem.

I would like to recover the data on this drive if possible. So anyway to set the file system or such would be appericated.

Thank you

bhaslinux · 07-22-2008, 03:20 AM

did you try
# pvscan
# vgscan
# vgchange -a y

The last command shows the name of the logical volumes which became active.
then run the command
# lvs

this gives the list of logical volumes
This way the lvm logical volumes will unhide and showup in /dev/mapper

The LVM is a physical volume which internally contains partitions (or logical volumes), so you cannot mount LVM directly.

Blinking cursor may be issue with grub preload state. That can be fixed using recovery tools , chrooting to the
/ and then issuing grub-install.

stricks · 07-22-2008, 07:23 AM

Thanks for the reply! I'll have to wait till I get home from work. I don't have internet at home for the moment so I can't log in to test it out... annoying.

jiml8 · 07-23-2008, 12:19 PM

I had a problem recently with my dual boot laptop (XP and Kubuntu) where an upgrade to Kubuntu 8.04 failed and left me with an inaccessible linux system (black screen, blinking cursor). It failed to boot, and from XP I could not mount the partitions.

I loaded Knoppix, which immediately found the linux partitions and displayed their contents. I then ran fsck, which reported no problems. I then ran fsck -f to force it, and again fsck reported no problems.

However, after that, Kubuntu started without incident and I could mount the partitions from XP.

What happened? No idea. But evidently just accessing them from Knoppix fixed it.

Just a thought...