[nylug-talk] Is it mounted or not ??

[Peter C. Norton]

Matt,

You would be well advised to do the following if you have a disk
that's larger than the one you're recovering:

dd if=/dev/<important_disk> of=/path/to/bigger/disk/important_data bs=1024k 

If that succeeds, you then want to use mount on the important_data
file, and you can see what the consequences are when using the copy
instead of the original.

If you're not using a fairly recent linux, where loopback mounts can
access partitions on disk images, you can image just the partition(s)
that interest you individiually.

I'm sure the process is a touch more complicated than my hand-waving
is making it, but the principle is probably familiar to you. Use it
and protect your data!

-Peter

On Mon, Oct 02, 2006 at 11:24:59PM +0000, matt black wrote:
> Thanks Alex for the excellent advice.
> 
> One quick question, when you say don't bother, do you mean bc its such a 
> pain or that we will blow the fs away?
> 
> Asking this because we finally (before reading your email) got it mounted 
> (-o ufstype=44bsd) and it looks like one small wirte operation could give 
> us a working system. If that single write operation would instead destroy 
> the fs, well, we wouldn't want to do that.
> 
> We're so close, and would value your input on whether or not to do this, 
> instead of heading back to the start line.
> 
> with appreciation,
> 
> matty
> 
> 
> 
> 
> >From: alex at pilosoft.com
> >Reply-To: NYLUG Technical Discussion <nylug-talk at nylug.org>
> >To: NYLUG Technical Discussion <nylug-talk at nylug.org>
> >Subject: Re: [nylug-talk] Is it mounted or not ??
> >Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 18:08:23 -0400 (EDT)
> >
> >On Mon, 2 Oct 2006, matt black wrote:
> >
> >> Thanks Peter for the response, indeed I may have to fire up debug2fs,
> >> although that seems like it will take more time than we thought we were
> >> in for here. Plus we would like to be able to use the machine and not
> >> just pull the data down.
> >>
> >> As it turns out, the problem is the file system, which seems to be some
> >> sort of ufs. I say seems, because all
> >>
> >> file - < /dev/wd0s4
> >>
> >> is "x86 boot sector, BSD disklabel"
> >>
> >> We were able to sort-of mount it using ufs but we need to know which ufs
> >> to mount without errors? Not taking any chances here on accidentally
> >> destroying the fs until we can determine exactly which one it is.
> >>
> >> We're still intent on mounting this thing -w however, so if anyone can
> >> tell us how to determine the exact file system, that might put us
> >> closer.  Thoughts?
> >don't bother trying mounting it rw on linux. use fbsd or whatever it was
> >originally created on.
> >
> >-alex
> >
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-- 
The 5 year plan:
In five years we'll make up another plan.
Or just re-use this one.