Getting data from old boot drive
 

Hi-

I have a Fedora Core 3 system. The old drive was too small (but works fine), so to be safe, I pulled it out, set it aside, bought a new drive and reinstalled FC3 on it. The new drive boots just fine. I would now like to put old boot drive back in system, set as slave, and pull data files from it to the new drive and then keep the old drive for a while as backup.

Of course, on boot, FC3 does not mount the old drive as it says there is already a drive labeled /boot. Yes - that is correct. So all I have is the new drive...

How do I relabel the old drive to something else that does not conflict with the new boot drive so I can get my data? Or is there a better way?

Thank you!
DC

Try mounting based on partitions, rather than labels.

Hi David-

Thank you for your reply. I did some looking around - with FC3, it is no longer just to edit /etc/fstab file with something like:

/dev/hdb1 /mnt/olddrive ext2 defaults 1 2

(I assume this is what you meant when you said to not use labels? Recall this will be first channel of ide, but slave drive, so it is hdb1 right?). The /etc/fstab file tells me to use fstab-sync. I am very confused by syntax of fstab-sync - this is not run thru a shell? There is also no hdb1 entry in the /dev folder. Plus it looks like FC3 noew uses /media as mount point and no longer /mnt. Correct?

Can you offer more assistance?

Thanks!
DC

Let's see what it recognizes: try running 'dmesg | grep hd' and see where it's finding that drive.

Ok. Here is what command gave:

# dmesg | grep hd
ide0: BM-DMA at 0xf000-0xf007, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:DMA
ide1: BM-DMA at 0xf008-0xf00f, BIOS settings: hdc:DMA, hdd:DMA
hda: Maxtor 7Y250P0, ATA DISK drive
hdb: ST380020A, ATA DISK drive
hdc: PLEXTOR DVDR PX-716A, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
hda: max request size: 1024KiB
hda: 490234752 sectors (251000 MB) w/7936KiB Cache, CHS=30515/255/63, UDMA(133)
hda: cache flushes supported
hda: hda1 hda2
hdb: max request size: 128KiB
hdb: 156301488 sectors (80026 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=65535/16/63, UDMA(100)
hdb: cache flushes not supported
hdb: hdb1 hdb2
hdc: ATAPI 40X DVD-ROM DVD-R CD-R/RW drive, 8192kB Cache, UDMA(66)
SCSI device sdc: 117231408 512-byte hdwr sectors (60022 MB)
SCSI device sdc: 117231408 512-byte hdwr sectors (60022 MB)

----
I see old drive is hdb. Ok.

I will probably need more hint to get this mounted correctly (especially with fstab-sync). :(

Thanks!
DC

According to the fstab-sync manpage, you should still be able to edit /etc/fstab for non-HAL activated devices, so I would imagine adding the proper line should be fine. Or just mounting without an fstab entry.

:(

I think I am missing something. Here is my fstab:
-----------------
/dev/hdb1 /media/drive2 auto defaults 1 2
/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 / ext3 defaults 1 1
LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /sys sysfs defaults 0 0
/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/hdc /media/cdrecorder auto pamconsole,exec,noauto,fscontext=system_u:object_r:removable_t,managed 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy auto pamconsole,exec,noauto,fscontext=system_u:object_r:removable_t,managed 0 0
-----------------

drive2 has been created in correct spot. :)

On boot, as it goes thru check, FC3 shows that there is a duplicate LABEL=/boot. Even though I have drive2 as first line in fstab file, somehow FC3 is still picking up the device by label, even though I use hdb1 for the drive2.

Q1) How to stop FC3 from looking at label of 2nd drive (the drive that used to be my boot drive) and mount by drive2?
Q2) What determine whether to use HAL or not?

Thanks!
DC

Oops. When I do mount as in last post, I see this:
[root@localhost drive2]# ls
config-2.6.10-1.770_FC3 initrd-2.6.10-1.770_FC3.img System.map-2.6.10-1.770_FC3 vmlinuz-2.6.11-1.14_FC3
config-2.6.11-1.14_FC3 initrd-2.6.11-1.14_FC3.img System.map-2.6.11-1.14_FC3 vmlinuz-2.6.11-1.27_FC3
config-2.6.11-1.27_FC3 initrd-2.6.11-1.27_FC3.img System.map-2.6.11-1.27_FC3 vmlinuz-2.6.9-1.667
config-2.6.9-1.667 initrd-2.6.9-1.667.img System.map-2.6.9-1.667
grub lost+found vmlinuz-2.6.10-1.770_FC3


I think this tells me something big, but I don't know what (yet).

Thanks!
DC

You can use 'tune2fs' to change the labels on the partitions.

Thanks David. That was the command I think I was looking for. I renamed the old drive to /xboot to remove the conflict when booting with the new drive. So now it boots with no errors.

I think last error is to find out why /media/drive2 show me config, initrd, System.map, and vmlinuz files... (see my last post). I thought I would see my old data and not file system internal files.

Thank you so much for all of this learning!
DC

Those are the files one would normally find in a boot partition...