One of my servers crashed and my attempts to recover the data off of it have been going nowhere. On boot, the system throws an error and drops me into a shell. The biggest issue is that the mnt file system is Read-Only in the shell as it is now. This means any of my external drives or usb's can't be mounted to transfer the data over. Using a network connection is out as well due to security issues with the company. Any help? Thanks.

an error? Too bad it didn't print anything specific so that someone could help.

If the filesystem is damaged, the disk will be mounted readonly to protect the data. You can't mount in a subdirectory, because that requires updating the readonly filesystem above it. You should boot from a rescue disk instead. Mount your system Read-only on /mnt/sysimage. After its there mount your external drive elsewhere and copy your data to it. Once you have a backup of all the data you can try to check and repair the filesystem.

Excuse me, the first one that occurs is Error: The Bios has corrupted the Hw-PMU resources. Then it tries to load, fails, and shows a screen that says Checking Filesystems. The first check is fine, second check is fine, then on the 3rd check it says fsck.ext4: No such file or directory while trying to open /dev/(our device): The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2 filesystem. If it's valid or really contains an ext2 system then it's corrupt. After troubleshooting we determined that this is pretty much a hardware failure based on the circumstances surrounding the failure. It then drops into a shell.

I attempted to boot into a Redhat 6.2 boot disk but I struggled navigating through the Boot Bios to do it properly. It lists a Sata Optical drive, A C:/ hard drive, and the front USB, and Normal. None of them work.

Ok I managed to boot onto a USB using SystemRescue CD. How do I mount the system though?

If you're onn HP hardware, then it could be this:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport...TypeId=3709945

Following up because someone else might have this problem later. On Red Hat, the file system is mounted under an LVM2_member system. Gparted doesn't recognize this but there was a program called Show Filesystems that was on the Rescue Disk which let me see the dm-# devices. From there I could mount the directories I needed, a rescue device, and copy them over. As for the machine, it is a hardware failure and dell should be fixing it. Thanks for all the help!