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Topic: Need some help with a harddrive mounting issue., Can't get on to my harddrive!

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300c_pilot Offline

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Posts: 217
Joined: Dec. 2005

Posted: Mar. 23 2006,18:00

Try using: mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt

If it is reporting as SDA1 then you try to mount as HDA1 the os does not know where it is. SATA & SCSI drives can come up as SDA, also if your drive is not on the primary IDE controller, I have had it report as SDA1.
Hope it helps.

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300c_Pilot
Boise, Idaho

Cammo

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Posted: Mar. 24 2006,03:21

Hmm, thanks for the reply. However, my HD is my only HD, and it's on primary IDE1 kinda thing... as well, my USB key is being picked up as SDA1.

300c_pilot Offline

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Posted: Mar. 24 2006,06:55

They where idea's, thats all. I made the mistake of not reading the whole post.

I ran into difficulty if the drives jumpers are set for cable select. I had trouble with speed of accessing the drive. But I could mount them. Maybe?

Also is it possible that the maxtor format wrote the partition table to the first partition and not the boot record? Western Digitals disk utils does this and it causes great frustration when trying to install additional OS's.
Smooth flights...

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300c_Pilot
Boise, Idaho

Cammo

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Joined: Mar. 2006

Posted: Mar. 24 2006,15:57

Sorry if I came off as angry or anything, believe me I appreciate any replies and ideas I can get

I can't remember how I hooked up the harddrive, it was so long ago... I think I used the Master/Slave system as opposed to cable select.

That partition table thing makes sense (if I knew better what it meant lol). Because when it scans it tells me it can't find a valid fat filesystem (but it DOES find the partition.) Like the output of Dmesg or whatever it is, hda1 always shows up but its like it can't identify if its Fat, Ext2, etc. What does it mean exactly if it wrote it to the first thing and not the boot record? How would I tell/fix it?

Btw, I think I used the same utility to format my olda drives in compy 350mhz, (although I might have partitioned them with another proggy but I don't think so) and they show up fine. As well, Knoppix can read my drive (maybe it has a less picky utility or something?) It all seems very weird to me.

300c_pilot Offline

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Posted: Mar. 25 2006,07:30

First, what ever you deside to do, you need to get a backup of your drive before it ends up getting messed up.

Try booting the machine into the bios, if the geometery in the bios is the same as the actual drive (heads, sectors, etc.) then the partition is most likely written to the master boot record.

If it is different then it is written to the first partition, on the drive. Basically the machine boots up to a small partition, that then calls a translation program that allows you to see the rest of the drive. This was a huge problem back when there was an 8gig & then 30 gig barriers that had to be overcome. The software was the only way to use the new larger capacity drives.

The MBR is a hidden area at the begining of your hard drive that an OS is not allowed to write to normally. Its main purpose is for storing the geomitry of the drive. For instance a 1.54 meg floppy disk is really about 1.7 megs the additional space is used by to os and normally not accessable by a user.

When the partition table is written to the c: drive it allows the OS to access it, the same as any file and it can cause grave problems for the inexperienced. Corruption is a very likely thing. Because this really means there are two actual partition tables, failure of ether one can cause complete loss of all the data on the drive.

If all of this fails then go to the store and get an IDE to USB adapter and mount it that way. After you back it up.
Good Luck...

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300c_Pilot
Boise, Idaho

14 replies since Mar. 20 2006,02:10

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Damn Small Linux Board » Damn Small Linux » Other Help Topics » Need some help with a harddrive mounting issue.