I built a new box with sata drive. I want to reclaim the data from my old computer.

I hang the old ide drive on the new box set as slave.

Boots fine.

Mtab insists on mounting the old drive as read only.

I can't copy data from the old drive to the new drive because of linux boolshix.

File name too long - which actually means there is a soft or hard link in a folder.

I don't need the hard or soft link. It's not part of the data I'm trying to transfer. So I could delete such links except the drive is read only even for root.

Which leaves me to transfer files and folders one at a time. Or some other boolshix.

mtab is not a configuration file, it is a record of what is mounted so it is not mtab that "insists on mounting the old drive as read only".

What are the partitions and file system types on the "old ide drive"? How are you mounting them? Are they in fstab? What are you using to "copy data from the old drive to the new drive"?

What do you mean by "boolshix"? Google returns precisely one result for it -- the OP.

Boolshix is a derived word based on an anglo-saxon word describing the waste product of a male bovine animal(esp. of the genus Bos) It is meant to be a slightly angry description of the waste product of a computer running a version of Linux as it's operating system.

The old drive was used to dual boot windows 2000 and and Ubuntu hardy.

The partitions are:

/dev/sdb1 fat32 windows operating system partition
/dev/sdb3 fat32 windows data partition
/dev/sdb5 fat32 windows data partition
/dev/sdb5 jfs linux root partition

From the terminal:
sudo umount /dev/sdb6
sudo mount -t jfs /dev/sdb6 /media/LINUXONE
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb6,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so

jfsutils is installed on the new computer

Note that automount from the file manager works to the extent that the contents of the drive are visible. It was also possible to copy the contents of the windows data folders to the new drive.

As soon as a symbolic link is hit in the linux folder an error is given and the copy stops.
This is while using the file manager. Using the terminal no error or explanation is given. The copy process just stops.

Could be a damaged file system. Have you tried (with /dev/sdb6 not mounted) /sbin/jfs_fsck /dev/sdb6?

What command are you using in the terminal to copy files? Have you tried rsync?

The command I used was cp -r -f /media/LINUXONE/home/jim/* /opt/old-comp-80gdrive/linux/jim-non-hidden.

I re-installed the operating system with the slave drive still on the new computer. I then saw the old drive in grub. Probably I could have booted from it although I did not try.

I did not format /opt during the installation process so I lost nothing of my original data.

When I tried the command given above it succeeded in copying everything with the exception of the symbolic links. It did not choke on the symbolic links it simply informed me that the file name was too long and continued copying.

I assume that by hanging the drive on the computer after the OS was installed caused confusion with grub and or ?

Anyway this problem can be marked solved.

Thank you for your help.

It sure beat copying 30G of files by hand one directory at a time.

Glad you found a solution.

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