drive mounting issue (SCSI on beige G3)

[Daniel Gimpelevich]

Fdisk only understands DOS partition tables, which of course wouldn't be
used by /dev/hda. You didn't say what kind of system had the processor
failure, but since you were told to use fdisk, one might assume it was
running a Microsoft operating system. However, you might have more luck if
you type "dmesg|less" and then "/Partition" to see what the kernel thought
of those drives. You can post the section from dmesg that begins with the
line "Partition check:" to further debug. If perchance you see lines for
the SCSI disks that begin with "[mac]" you should also post the output of
"pdisk -L" before going further.

On Sun, 26 Sep 2004 21:58:44 -0400, Benjamin Warfield wrote:

> First a little background: I'm trying to recover the data from a dead 
> system (processor failure) by putting the drives from it into another 
> system, so I can mount them and copy whatever data's worth saving.  
> This means that I have two SCSI drives, both with ext3 partitions on 
> them, connected up to a G3 minitower (IDE boot drive), which minitower 
> (borrowed from a friend) is running YDL 3.0, largely unmodified and 
> un-updated (don't worry, it's not on the internet).
> 
> Everything seemed to be working fine: I'd gotten everything hooked up, 
> booted into linux, and the drives were recognized without apparent 
> trouble.  Then I tried to mount them, and got "VFS: can't find ext3 
> filesystem on sd(8,5)" (and other similar messages when I tried other 
> numbers when I tried the other drive and other partition numbers, in 
> case I'd misremembered the partition number).  At the suggestion of my 
> roommate, I tried fdisk -l and was told "Disk /dev/sda doesn't contain 
> a valid partition table", with the same message for /dev/sdb... and 
> also for /dev/hda, which is the boot drive on a system which is very 
> obviously booted just fine.  For reference, that's fdisk and mount 
> v2.11y.
> 
> Anybody care to explain to me what I'm missing on this?  I'm fairly 
> sure the disks were not damaged in the death of the old system (it 
> seemed like processor failure), and I haven't done anything rash with 
> them since then.
> 
> Thanks for any help you can offer!
> 
> 	--Ben Warfield
> 
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