I had a laptop running Win XP and Redhat 7.2. The laptop crashed and all I am left with is HD. I want to mount my old linux distro, Redhat 7.2, and grab the files I need off it before I format the HD. Does anybody have any tips on how I can do this. Right now on a different computer I am running Slackware 10.0 and that is what I want to use to mount the laptop HD, I just don't know what commands to put in the /etc/fstab. I also have IDE connector /dev/hdd open right now that I can use to plug the laptop HD onto. Any information or help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

sgf2

I guess it's simple and you don't need fstab necessarily...

first, plug the HD in. it becomes /dev/hdd if I read your post right, so next we'll simply mount it. create a mountpoint to your /mnt (be root):

mkdir /mnt/backup

the next step is to mount the device. you can add an fstab entry if you wish (if you want to access the disk afterwards simply with one short mount command) but it's not necessary:

mount -t ext2 /dev/hdd /mnt/backup

if ext2 is the filesystem on the HD you want to mount. you can try to mount without the "-t ext2" option too...now if all went well, you can access all the files in /mnt/backup that are in the HD. then simply copy them from /mnt/backup to some other place on your other HD or burn them to cds or something...after you're done,

umount /mnt/backup

and you're done. or then don't umount, but format the disk right away

Will this mount option allow me to see all the Linux partitions on the HD?

No, you'll need to mount each partition on hdd separately. So make multiple mount points and mount each partition in turn.

Should I run 'fdisk /dev/hdd' to find out what all of my Linux partitions are?

fdisk -l should show them

Cheers,
Tink

Thanks for all the help, I will give this a try when I get home from work and let you know if it works.