unable to mount device
 

I'm having difficulty mounting a hard drive partition.

I know that sounds like a personal problem :) ...

The IDE hard drive is installed as a slave, and it's info & partitions can be viewed using fdisk.

This is it:

Disk /dev/hdb: 163.9 GB, 163927522816 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19929 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdb1 * 1 26 208813+ 83 Linux
/dev/hdb2 27 19863 159340702+ 83 Linux
/dev/hdb3 19864 19928 522112+ 82 Linux swap

Device /dev/hdb1 mounts using the following command:

mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb1 /temp1

But device /dev/hdb2 won't mount using the same command:

mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb2 /temp2

This produces the following error:

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdb2,
or too many mounted file systems

I apparently am using the correct file system type - Id 83 denotes type ext3. And since I can mount other devices, I don't think the problem is "too many mounted file systems".

When running:

fsck -f /dev/hdb2

I get the following results:

fsck 1.32 (09-Nov-2002)
e2fsck 1.32 (09-Nov-2002)
/: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while reading block 530

/: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read reading journal superblock

fsck.ext2: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while checking ext3 journal for /

And when running:

badblocks -v /dev/hdb2

A dozen or so bad blocks are found.

I'm running RedHat Linux 9.

Any ideas or suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

thanks,

lance turner
latu.net

This may sound silly, but you did put a file system on that partition correct? Just because it is an available partition does not mean there is actually a file system on there.

You did run something like mkfs, mkext3fs, mkfs.ext3 or one of those cloned apps?

The drive was previously in use on another server, which suffered an early death. The other server was running Fedora, and the file system being used was ext3.

If a file system has been corrupted will installing a new file system wipe out the data on a device? Is there a way of installing a new file system on a device and preserving the existing data?

Installing a new file system will definately overwrite any data you have.

You can possibly do a google search on e2fsprogs and snag up the e2salvage app. It can be used to try to "salvage" a file system off a drive that is going bad.

Have you tried running fsck on that device?

You might be able to fix it with that

Yes, I did run fsck.

fsck -f /dev/hdb2

Resulted in the following error:

/: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while reading block 530

/: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read reading journal superblock

fsck.ext2: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while checking ext3 journal for /

I'm now considering using R-Linux.

http://www.data-recovery-software.ne...Recovery.shtml

It runs on a PC, but I couldn't find a comparable tool for Linux.

Does anyone have experience using R-Linux?

Hmm Never hrd of that. The one I was thinking of was

http://e2salvage.sourceforge.net/