Question

Mounting a 2nd hard drive

Asked by: mraible

A few months ago, I setup a 2nd hard drive on my RH 9 box.  Last night, I tried replacing that with a new disk (which was NTFS formatted).  It gave me errors on bootup, so I ended up getting rid of the entry and now I'm trying to put the original drive back in place.  Hopefully, I didn't lose my 20 GB of data on the first drive.

When trying to get rid of the entry, I did "rm /dev/hdb1" rather than removing the entry from /etc/fstab.  Now I can't get it back - maybe I deleted all my data?
Here's the error I'm getting now:

[root@drevil /]# mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb1 /data
mount: /dev/hdb1 is not a block device

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Asked On
2003-11-07 at 08:05:28ID20791101
Tags

drive

,

mount

,

hard

Topic

Linux Administration

Participating Experts
1
Points
250
Comments
4

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Answers

 

by: arjanhPosted on 2003-11-07 at 08:21:06ID: 9702158

Hi mraible,

I think you may just only have deleted the device pointer to your partition. Try the following command, and then try again mounting it:
mknod /dev/hdb1 b 3 65

This will recreate the special device pointer in the /dev tree

Cheers,
Arjan

 

by: mraiblePosted on 2003-11-07 at 08:27:35ID: 9702219

Hmmm, maybe I did delete all my data?  I tried this and here are my results:

[mraible@drevil mraible]$ su
Password:
[root@drevil mraible]# mknod /dev/hdb1 b 3 65
mknod: `/dev/hdb1': File exists
[root@drevil mraible]# rm /dev/hdb1
[root@drevil mraible]# mknod /dev/hdb1 b 3 65
[root@drevil mraible]# cd /data
[root@drevil data]# mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb1 /data
[root@drevil data]# ls
[root@drevil data]# ll
total 0

Here's what I was getting on startup (I haven't tried it with this change):

Checking filesystems
/dev/hdb1:
The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2 filesystem.                                                                                
If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2 filesystem (and not swap
or ufs or something else), then the superblock is corrupt and you might try running
e2fsck with an alternate superblock:
    e2fsck -b 8193 <device>
                                                                               
In /etc/fstab, I have:
                                                                               
/dev/hdb1       /data   ext3    defaults 1 2
                                                                               
If I run 32fsck -b 8193 /dev/hdb1, I get:
                                                                               
e2fsck 1.32 (09-Nov-2002)
e2fsck: Is a directory while trying to open /dev/hdb1


 

by: mraiblePosted on 2003-11-07 at 08:31:09ID: 9702254

As strange as it may sound - this actually worked!  I don't know what changed, but I switched back to my Windows machine (which has a mapped drive to a directory on this 2nd hard disk, using Samba) and it connected!  And all my files are there!!  You've made my day - thanks arjunh!

 

by: arjanhPosted on 2003-11-07 at 08:48:50ID: 9702393

Glad I could help! I know the feeling when you think you have just deleted all your data :)

Because you first did a 'cd /data' and then mounted something on that place, the ls command was still looking at the old (empty) mount point. If you had done a 'cd ..; cd data' you would have seen the actual mounted data.

Safer (at least for your own mind) is first mounting and then cd'ing to that place:
mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb1 /data
cd /data
ll

Then you would have seen the same thing immediately as what Samba is showing now.

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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