Difficulty getting a large disk mounted.

[Craig White]

On Mon, 2005-02-21 at 18:22 -0500, Matt Considine wrote:
> Hi,
> I've checked the archives and cannot find commentary on this.  Hoping I 
> didn't overlook something, here goes ...
> 
> Running FC3 and Gnome, I am trying to get a third harddisk recognized. 
> This one had a partition (11G) for the Win99 OS and the remaining 
> partition was divided up into virtual drives.  Total size is 60G if I 
> recall.
> 
> The hardware brower recognizes this as
> 
>      Device Start End   Size(MB)  Type
> /dev/hdd
>      /hdd1  1     1460  11453     fat32
>             1     1460  11453     Free space
>      /hdd2  1461  7296  45779     No filesystem
>             7297  7298     10     Free space
> 
> These are associated with subdirectories, respectively,
>    /mnt/boot
>    /mnt/root
> 
> I can see the files on "boot" without a problem.  But I cannot
> see the files on "root".
> 
> Can someone either tell me how or point me to the instructions to get
> these files recognized?  When I type (as root)
> 
>    mount -t vfat /dev/hdd2 /mnt/root
> 
> I get the following message :
>    mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdd2,
>           or too many mounted file systems
> 
> Any help would be appreciated, as well as everyone's patience if I 
> missed something simple.
-----
I guess I don't understand exactly what you are saying.

I can see that there is a partition /dev/hdd2 but I don't understand
your comment about the rest of the the partition being divided into
virtual drives.

Then you say that you called these things /mnt/boot and /mnt/root
but /dev/hdd1 is fat32 so that hardly qualifies as a suitable partition
for a linux boot and /dev/hdd2 - at least on appearance doesn't have a
suitable filesystem at all. The free space leftovers seem to indicate
some type of funky partitioning tool was used. I am gathering that if
you did try to install a filesystem (sometimes called 'formatting' or
'initializing') that it didn't succeed.

If there is no valuable data on the /dev/hdd2, you could probably just
from command line...

mkfs -t [ext3|ext2|vfat] /dev/hdd2

I always had problems creating vfat partitions larger than 32mb. Perhaps
that is just me.

if you feel that you had indeed created a filesystem on /dev/hdd2 like
in Windows or something else and indeed have valuable data on that
drive, then re-examine by booting Windows or the tool you used to create
it and see if it's still there.

Craig