Hello everybody,

I use Testdisk from the System Rescue Cd to undelete files.

I need to use an external hard drive to copy the undeleted files found by Testdisk.

How could I mount the external hard drive and such Testdisk could copy the files on it? I prefer to use the graphical interface for this not the command line.

Thanks in advance,

Andrew262

Hi Andrew262. If you prefer to get instructions on the GUI, you have to tell us which GUI you want to use That's the nice thing about a Posix shell; easy to provide instructions for in plain text, and for most common system tasks, it's pretty much the same no matter what.

I'll take a stab at it, but if you let us know what desktop GUI you're running, that will probably help. You can mount an external drive in almost any graphical file manager, such as Nautilus, Caja, Thunar, Dolphin, and so on. As long as you have one of those loaded, open a window, plug your hard drive in, and then click on it in the side pane of the file manager to mount it. That ought to work.

Here's a screenshot. Notice the little drive icon in the lower left of the dolphin window. I clicked that, and the drive mounted. https://www.unixporn.pro/i/bM7uLVC.jpg

Try that. If it doesn't work, report back.

If it does work, kindly report back.

Edit: in spite of you preferring the GUI, here's how to do it in a shell:

1. Look at the drives currently attached to your computer:

2. Plug in your external hard drive.

3. Look at the drives again:

The new entry there is the drive you just pligged in. Let's call it sdx (it will probably be sdb or sdc, but I don't know your setup).

4. Mount your drive:

5. That's all. Your drive is now located at /storage

You can open a file manager to that location in your GUI by typing in the name of the file manager you use, plus the path. For example:

Just to add to notKlaatu's reply, often the file manager will automatically mount any devices that are connected. In that case you don't need to do anything, although you may need to make a note of the actual mount point so that you can point Testdisk at the device.

This is the case, for example, in my Linux Mint 18.1 system using the Caja file manager.

Almost any big name distro can be booted live and use testdisk if you want to use a gui.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Livecd

See this for clues to use as installed rescue or from live media with package manager while live.

Hello everybody,

thanks for your replies.

NotKlaatu thanks for your tutorial. I've tried it and got this message: " you must specify the filesystem type".

I am using System Rescue Cd to launch Testdisk to undelete the files.

Years ago I've been able to mount the external hard drive by typing "startx" from System Rescue Cd and once I entered in the GUI I've clicked on something like "System", ???, then "File Manager" and I've been able to access the external drive and to create directories on it. Then I quit startx, I launched Testdisk and then Testdisk copied the deleted files directly in the directories I've created in the GUI.

Could you please help me how to do it again from System Rescue Cd's GUI.

Thanks in advance,

Andrew.


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The "startx" command gets you into a graphical user interface and you can then navigate in the file manager to where the device/partition is mounted. If you got an error message " you must specify the filesystem type" then what you need to do is specify the filesystem. Since we don't know what partition on your disk you are referring to and we don't know what filesystem is on the partition, we can't do more than give an example below of a simple mount command with and without filesystem type:

You would obviously need to create the 'data' directory first (explained in post above) and do this as root which is probably the default on a Rescue disk. The "ext4" is the filesystem so if yours is different you will obviously need to change that.

I don't have System Rescue available but, most newer Linux systems will have disk partitions available under the /media directory by UUID so if you can find the file manager and navigate to the /media directory, check to see if your external drive partition is there. You should be able to determine which it is with the lsblk command explained above. If not, you should be able to create a directory and mount the partition there.