I wonder if someone can help.

I have an old(ish) SCSI hard disk which was originally in a Solaris workstation. The workstation has died recently - it was fairly geriatric - but I'd like to recover the files from the disk.

I have connected the disk to my desktop which runs Mandrake 8 Linux, but I cannot persude the disk to mount. The SCSI card sees the disk, and DiskDrake shows it as being present but empty. My other hard disks are IDE.

I have been trying the following:

mount -t ufs -o ufstype=sun /dev/sda1 /scala

but get the following:

mount: /dev/sda1 is not a valid block device

I have tried this with partition numbers from sda1 to sda9 with the same result. Unfortunately I can't remember exactly how the disk was formatted - either format type or number and location of partitions.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Cheers ...

Welcome to LQ, Crac.
What happens when you issue a fdisk -l /dev/sda?

OK - I just tried the following, with the following results:

# fdisk -l /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 231 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System

#

That was it - I guess that this means it can't find any partitions on the disk? I also guess that this is not a good thing?

If there are partitions on the disk which have been lost, is there some way in which I can recover them? Or is this not likely to be the problem?

I'm not so interested in the disk itself as the data on it...

All suggestions appreciated.

Crac

Hmm, does sound like no partitions. You could try mounting the device rather than a partition, but it is only a long shot. I can't think of any partition table recovery utils/apps around. I don't know much about Solaris stuff, but would it be worth trying the disk in another Solaris box (you know of anyone with one?), see if it recognises it, then perhaps copy the stuff over with NFS?

I've done some more stuff since yesterday - I downloaded a few tools like gpart, parted and fixdisk... (can't remember the full name at the moment). One of them found one UFS partition, the others found nothing.

I did find a whole bunch of suggestions as to how to use these tools to identify your partitions and then use fdisk to recreate the partitions without formatting them. I tried it with the one I identified, but it still wouldn't mount.

I suspect the stupid thing I did was boot my system to NT 4.0 with the disk plugged in and use Disk Administrator to try to access it - I think this probably overwrote the superblock with some DOS rubbish. My own fault ...

I'm not getting anywhere with it at the moment, so my next move will rpobabyl be to check out data recovery agencies and see if any of them can have a go at it for less than a fortune.

Thanks for your help and others should heed the warning - Windows NT will mess up your disk!!!