Hi I hope someone out there can help me - I am new to linux and am using Mandrake Linux 9.1. I have a hard drive from a machine of mine which died and had Mandrake Linux 8.2 and I want to retreive the info from it. I have tried installing it as a Primary IDE Slave hard drive on my Mandrake linux 9.1 machine but it will not let me mount it and keeps asking me do I want to erase the information stored on it - I certainly do not want to do that. I just have some files in a folder on it and want to get them off, after that I dont care what happens the disk - any ideas anyone??

Do you still have MDK 9.1 installation cds? You'll need the 1st one. Connect the 8.1 disk as primary slave, boot from the cd, enter 'rescue' mode.

Now you need to mount two partitions: the one you'd like to copy the data from and the one to copy them to. Let's say you have one partition on /dev/hdb (primary slave) and the partition you'd like to copy to is /dev/hda5.

The commands are:
mkdir /mnt/master
mkdir /mnt/slave
mount -t ext3 /dev/hda5 /mnt/master
mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb1 /mnt/slave

Note that you may need to change partiton types and numbers (to see current partitioning scheme of dev/hda, use 'fdisk /dev/hda', then press 'p' to list partitions and 'q' to quit).

Now you have source in /mnt/slave and destination in /mnt/master. The only thing now is to copy the data (if you're not familiar with the 'cp' command, read its manual before you start).

Hi, thanks for your reply - however when I follow the steps I get the error -
wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdb, or too many mounted filesystems

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated
Also, When i do fdisk /dev/hdb I get the error "Unable to read /dev/hdb"

Are the jumpers configured correctly for a slave drive?