when I installed fedora I also had debian on the system, when grub created itself it seems to have overrun debian or at least not place it in grub.
When I look at my hardware configuration I can see my win 98 partition which I have mounted then I also see a hde3 which I assume can be either my debian or at least my raid information.

Is there a way to mount or to physically see the data contained on that partition?

Your help is greatly appreciated, I have lost some data and I may be able to get it back this way.

If it has a Linux filesystem on it I'd think it would mount easilly:

mkdir /oldlinix

mount /dev/hd3 /oldlinux

(You may want to specify -t if you know the filesystem type - usually -t ext3.)

You could then cd /oldlinux and see what is there.

However if its a RAID device are you sure it isn't a /dev/sd* rather than a /dev/hd*?

You can run fdisk against /dev/hde to see what partitions it has.

here is an actual read out of harddrive config
hdg start end size type
hdg3 1 7140 56000 software raid component
hdg1 7141 7152 94 ext 3
hdg2 7153 9964 22058 lvm physical volume

so are you saying I can created a dir in /mnt then mount /hdg/hdg3 /mnt/dir and I would be able to read the info?

Can this be done for all the drives being listed above?

thanks

I believe it would work for hdg1 because it shows as ext 3.

My general statement was that you can mount a valid filesystem on a running server so long as it knows the filesystem type you are using. This is why you can mount floppies and CDs even when created on other servers. To put it another way you don't have to mount something in the same place all the time. You could for example unmount /home and remount it as /mnt.

Unfortunately I don't know enough about Linux slicing in RAID to comment on the other 2 devices you list. It is conceivable to me that they are only information slices (this was common on SCO Unix and also the way Veritas Volume Manager represents Public and Private regions rather than actual slices).

Having said that I don't believe just attempting the mount on the other 2 would cause damage. Either mount would understand them and mount successfully or it wouldn't know what to do with them and simply wouldn't mount them.

Of couse you would want to mount them separately (/mnt, /mnt1, /mnt2) or make sure you umounted the first one from /mnt before attempting to mount the second one there.

Given my caveats above I'll have to include try this at your own risk because I can't certify it will work.

thanks I was able to mount all 3 and have a look.