Can Linux only see the boot partition of other Linux installations?

gusblake · 02-13-2010, 02:11 PM

Hi,

I have two hard drives, each with Fedora 12 installed. I messed up the first installation by uninstalling some packages that were apparently important, and now I'm running the second installation.

When I plug the first drive in to get the files back, it appears as a '210mb filesystem' and I can only see system files.

This has happened twice, so it seems unlikely that each drive has broken in the time it takes to install Fedora and plug it back in.

I have logged in as root, in case it was a security issue, but I still can't see the main partition. Is there any way I can get my files back?

Any advice would be appreciated.

Cheers,
Gus

jschiwal · 02-13-2010, 02:20 PM

I'm not sure what you mean by plugging in the first drive. Did you boot to it or are you adding it and trying to access the filesystems on it? Did you have the default /boot,swap,LVM installation?

If it did use an LVM volume, you can run "vgmknodes" to create the logical volume devices. Then mount the logical volumes.

gusblake · 02-13-2010, 02:29 PM

Yeah, I'm still booting from the good (2nd) installation and trying to view the filesystems on the messed up installation.

Yes I selected 'use whole drive and create default layout' in the install process.

I'll try vgmknodes and post back.

Thanks for your help,

Gus

gusblake · 02-13-2010, 02:52 PM

Code:

vgmknodes /dev/sdc1

(I'm using a USB enclosure)

outputs this:

Code:

  Volume group "sdc1" not found
  Skipping volume group sdc1

does the drive have to be plugged in to the motherboard (as opposed to USB) in order for the volume group to exist?

Edit - just worked out what it stands for. But after this,

Code:

vgmknodes vg_hoggblake

everything is still the same...

jefro · 02-13-2010, 03:53 PM

A similar system ought to be able to view the files and the partition.

I guess it could be possible that the drive geometry is off somehow.

I think a live fedora cd would have worked. Put it back in the old system and boot to a live distro.

jschiwal · 02-13-2010, 06:25 PM

Please you post the output of "sudo /sbin/fdisk -l /dev/sdc".

If you aren't running Fedora on your computer, using a Fedora live CD would be a good idea. It will have LVM support, and support for the version of the filesystem on the drive. For example, if the distro doesn't have support for ext4.