USB HDD Mounting - which filesystem?
 

Hi,

I have two hard disk drives from an older machine (25gb and 30gb). They have some data on them I want to get so I need to attach the drives to my linux box to get the data.

I have an external usb bay that I use with another drive sucessfully on the linux box. The drive I use has one fat32 partition with data and is mounted manually using a

'mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mountpoint '

command.

The other two drives have unknown filesystems. (Either fat, ext2, ext3 or reiserfs). I would like to probe the drives to check the partition structure. I tried 'cfdisk /dev/sda1' but it returned 'no partition table or unknown signature on partition table' for both drives. Does anyone know how to probe the partition structure?

I managed to mount one of the drives with 'mount -t ext2 /dev/sda1 /mountpoint' which mounted a 100mb partition with grub files, vmlinuz etc. This is probably from an old redhat install and is most likely the first partition of the disk. Any idea how to mount later partitions of a disk through usb?

If anyone can answer either of the two questions or has any comments to make your response will be much appreciated.

Yours,

Graham.

Did you try "mount -t ext2 /dev/sda2 /mountpoint"?

And, "fdisk -l /dev/sda", should list all the partitions on the drive.

The "sd" means SCSI drive.
The "a" means the first drive.
The "#" means the partition on the drive.

In "cfdisk /dev/sda1" sda1 is the partition, not the drive. You can't list the partitions in a partition, since there aren't any.

Great! I should have realised that after using ide hard drives!

Thanks very much, that works very well. ps - I had tried sda2 but it was a swap partition so didn't work.

Thanks again!

Graham.