Hello I am super green to Linux and my boss tasked me with hooking up an old Linux server and retrieving data off it. Well I don't have a clue were to start the server has not video interface but it has a nic a serial port and a usb port I am trying to find a way to collect the data off this server before we decommission it. I would appreciate any help thank you!!!!

Assuming you do not have the username and password, and the data is UNencrypted (if it is, you have a problem!) then what I would do myself is simply:

Remove hard drive
Place drive in a spare drive bay or enclosure attached to the desktop/workstation where you want to copy the data
Boot with any Linux Live CD and copy the data using the file manager

However there are MANY things that can complicate this task, such as encrypted data, RAID, hardware failure, etc. so why not just hire a consultant/temp for a half day?

Hi hunterzero,

Welcome to LQ!!!

Is this server still on the network or it is just lying down somewhere and you want to get the data off this server? If it is still on the network then you can connect to it using other linux servers in the environment and copy over the data using scp. If you want to copy the data via Windows machine then you can use WinSCP which will help you in copying that linux server data onto your Windows machine.

If it is lying down somewhere then you can connect your laptop or a nearby desktop to it using cable (peer to peer) and the configure the network on both Windows machine and linux machine so that they can communicate. Later you can use WinSCP to copy over the data.

yeah its raided 4 hard disk. My company is cheap so no consultant just me and as for user name and password i have no ideal i am ready to throw the thing against the wall

I have is sitting on my work bench connected it to my serial port but i am sure i am not doing it right

As you said that you connect it using serial port I am assuming that you have got physical access to the system. Which distribution of linux do you have on this server. I hope you boss has given you some documents to read atleast which can tell us about the distribution.

You can reset the root password by going in single user mode. You can find out the documentation on google as to how you can get into single user mode.

Once done you can reboot the system normally. Login as root, configure the network and then perform the steps mentioned in my previous post.

+1 to the above; you'll certainly need to get into single-user mode before you do much of anything, since you do not have username/password.