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Genuine newbie - never posted on anyone's site before. For the last several decades I've been able to find or determine a solution (I'm new to Linux).
I've resurrected an old Dell Precision 360 (3gb) and installed and updated Mint Cinnamon 18.1 on a new WD 1tb hard drive (serial ATA).
On a matching hard drive I had installed Pinguy (it failed to boot after an update) which has several files I'd love to access.
blked shows both discs correctly as sda1 and sdb1 with their correct identifying attributes.
I've followed many threads to try many solutions to mount the drive without success. Because this is a bootable Linux drive, it has several partitions (Pinguy defaults used).
Is there a relatively painless way to access this drive or should I simply exercise the nuclear option & cut my losses?
With Mint, the partitions should show up as new devices in your file manager - and probably mounted. Just tried with Mint Mate and they certainly did. Let's see the output of these after plugging the drive in.
Also check out /etc/fstab where you can specify mount-points, the means of communicating with them (if applicable), and whether you want them to be automatically mounted at startup.
Linux will identify the attached disks and the usable partitions thereupon, and will create /dev/sd... entries for each of them. But as for mounting, it consults /etc/fstab.
- - -
Although not pertinent to this case, you should also check out "Logical Volume Management (LVM)." You can spread-out a single mount point across several drives.
Last edited by sundialsvcs; 04-12-2017 at 09:04 AM.
Question for jailbait:
I like the approach but am afraid to reinstall Grub on a running system!
When you said, "Boot into your Linux Mint system ..." did you mean
that I should simply boot it up or are you suggesting that I boot from a usb
or similar then go have a peek? Meanwhile your suggestion led me to learn a bit about Grub. Always wondered how that worked!
Am I being a silly paranoid old man about this? (I still have scars - some are fresh!)
--------------------------------
Shadow_7 - very clear instructions!
Tried that and after cd'ing into the new partion ls showed nothing.
Commands and Output:
james@james-390 ~ $ sudo mkdir /mnt/partitionSdb
[sudo] password for james:
james@james-390 ~ $ cd /mnt/partitionSdb
james@james-390 /mnt/partitionSdb $ sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/partitionSdb
mount: unknown filesystem type 'VMFS_volume_member'
james@james-390 /mnt/partitionSdb $ ls
james@james-390 /mnt/partitionSdb $ cat /proc/partitions
major minor #blocks name
james@james-390 /mnt $ sudo umount /dev/sdb1
umount: /dev/sdb1: not mounted
And here's the output from blkid:
james@james-390 /mnt $ blkid
/dev/sda1: UUID="af5db090-62c2-4811-92ee-17b7f37a683e" TYPE="ext2" PARTUUID="0c241aeb-01"
/dev/sda5: UUID="smCA9d-YyP5-DzB4-cLrC-2S1D-bmyo-MOU5e0" TYPE="LVM2_member" PARTUUID="0c241aeb-05"
/dev/sdb1: UUID_SUB="4ad261d0-dbb0789a-5ee8-001aa00158c0" UUID="4ad261d0-c702c92a-e2e9-001aa00158c0" TYPE="VMFS_volume_member"
/dev/mapper/mint--vg-root: UUID="5b0cbcc7-a894-407d-a6ab-09a87c10e03f" TYPE="ext4"
The desired partition sdb1 is definitely recognized by the hardware.
Please remember that this is a disc previously used to hold Linux Pinguy, which failed to boot after its last update (without error messages).
About all that changes is the name of thing you mount ( /dev/mapper/mint--vg-root in your case ). And the tools needed to get useful information (and to be able to use them). Of course you need to install those tools in some cases.
Question for jailbait:
I like the approach but am afraid to reinstall Grub on a running system!
When you said, "Boot into your Linux Mint system ..." did you mean
that I should simply boot it up or are you suggesting that I boot from a usb
or similar then go have a peek? Meanwhile your suggestion led me to learn a bit about Grub.
What I am suggesting is that you boot into your Linux Mint system as normal.
Then open a terminal.
Then issue the su command and give your password when asked.
Then issue the command: grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg grub-mkconfig will list every bootable system that grub finds on any of your partitions.
Then issue the command: grub-install /dev/sda This will create a new grub boot screen, among other things.
boot your computer.
When the grub menu appears use the down arrow key to select your panguy system if it is listed.
Hit enter and grub will attempt to boot your panguy system.
Jailbait,
Your last instructions were very explicit - exactly what I needed.
After finishing some pending tasks and backup to a usb drive, I followed those instructions.
The process finished without error.
The boot process only finds one bootable partition - the Linux Mint18, as before.
No harm, no foul.
Hardware still sees the 2nd disc and I'm still unable to see anything thereupon.
Either the disc or software is unreadable.
When time permits I'll reformat it and find some good use.
Thanks all.
I'll also figure out how to "wrap my code in tags".
I've never used vSphere but VMFS i.e. VMware Virtual Machine Filesystem is a special filesystem to store virtual machine disk images. You might be able to mount sdb1 via fuse by installing the vmfs-tools package.
At the moment there is no indication that Pinguy was installed on the second drive unless it was a virtual machine. As stated just reformat it.
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