[vox-tech] mounting new HD

[ME]

keywords: hard drive, harddrive, hard disk, harddisk, corruption, vfat,
keywords: fat32, linux, geometry translation, 

(Please read the message from Mark Kim first as his suggestion is most
likely the solution to your problems.)

Other things to try if after his suggestion you find there are still
problems:

We had a person on our campus who lost their whole system to a recent
virus that has been making its rounds.

Some other thoughts beyond a true loss of data:

Geometry translation tool/program that starts from their disk at
startup. This is more common on older systems that cannot deal with larger
disks that have too many cyls, or are too large for BIOS/system. These
systems need to load the geometry translation tool/program from disk at
boot, and will often be unreadable from other systems when they do not
boot from that disk.

If you are just looking to re-install the OS, you may be able to boot from
the CD-ROM that came with the machine. (You could install Linux, which
does not have anything close to the problems with viruses that windows
does.)

Try installing the "mtools" package with your linux system and read the
man pages associated with them. Not so sure mtools can help you with
fixing the disk, but you may be able to grab *some* files with mtools.

If you are a linux novice and computer novice, make sure you have properly
connected the HD to your system. If you have a primary master, and you
connect their drive to your primary (E)IDE interface, make sure their
drive is set to be a slave, or you may have more problems with both
disks. If you put it on the secondary interface of an (E)IDE bus, then
make sure there is only one master and one slave and the drives are
properly jumped.

If the Disks are SCSI, then make sure the drive's SCS ID is unique on the
bus.

It is a good idea to mount the drive or access it as a "read
only" device. To the defaults arguement, just modify it to read:
defaults,ro  to limit accidental writing to the disk - which could lead to
more damage.

Other suggestions are likely to exist based on the results of your further
testing.

Again, go with mark Kim's suggestion first. :-)

-ME
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     Systems Department Operating Systems Analyst for the SSU Library

On Thu, 6 Dec 2001, Kai Harris wrote:
> My roommates computer just crashed.  She is (was) running win98se and it 
> appears to me that at least the windows directory (and possibly more) is 
> corrupted.  It won't boot and there are too many errors on the disk for 
> scandisk to handle so we can't reinstall the OS.
> I am trying to mount the drive to my linux machine so I can burn her personal 
> files to a cd.  However, when I try to mount it, I get this error message:
> 
> mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdb, or too many 
> mounted file systems
> 
> this is the entry in fstab:
> 
> /dev/hdb /mnt/natalie vfat defaults 1 1
> 
> I got this line from a help file on installing a new drive at linuxnewbie.org
> http://www.linuxnewbie.org/nhf/intel/hardware/hd_add.html
> 
> could it be that the drive is so corrupted that it isn't recognized as a fat 
> filesystem?  I really dont know what else to try.  Thank you in advance!
> Kai
> p.s. my linux technical knowledge is limited, I wont be offended if you "dumb 
> down" any responses!