Retrieving data from drive; shows boot files only

[Bazu135]

A while back, I had a laptop that bit the dust. Fast forward to the present day, and I've bought a SATA to USB cable and am trying to retrieve files from the laptop's old hard drive. I've connected it all up correctly, and am able to mount the drive - however, it's being listed as a 210MB Filesystem (the drive is 120GB), and appears to only be showing the boot files (see attachment).

fdisk -l shows the drive, and vgscan doesn't list any conflicts, so it seems all is well in that regard. How would I go about digging deeper and getting at the files I want?

(If it's relevant, the drive ran F12, and I'm now on F16)

Many thanks in advance!

[cazo]

That looks like the boot partition from the Fedora 12 drive. You should have another partition. What's in the one that starts with _Fedora-14-i? That looks like it should be the root from a Fedora 14 (i386?) system.

It might help to post the output of

fdisk -l /dev/sdb

(if your USB drive gets mounted there).

[Bazu135]

The Fedora 14 drive is my old Fedora install on this PC - I installed F16 on a separate partition to try it out properly first; I'll be sorting that out when I have time to.

The drive mounts at /dev/sdg:

[root@neko neko]# fdisk -l /dev/sdg

Disk /dev/sdg: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders, total 234441648 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x537c5b79

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdg1   *          63      409662      204800   83  Linux
/dev/sdg2          409663   234436544   117013441   8e  Linux LVM

Looking back at that, I assume the * would indicate the partition it looks at by default? If so, I guess I just need to set sdg2 to be the default - how would I do that, assuming I'm on the right track?

[sidebrnz]

No. The asterisk means that the partition is bootable, something that only applies to Microsoft products. /dev/sdg1 is /boot and /dev/sdg2 contains everything else in a LVM partition, something that fdisk doesn't understand.

[Bazu135]

Ah - yeah, that's obvious now that I look at it!

Had a poke around the forum, and had a go at manually mounting it, like so:

[root@neko neko]# mkdir /mnt/external
[root@neko neko]# mount /dev/sdg2 -t lvm /mnt/external
mount: unknown filesystem type 'lvm'
[root@neko neko]# mount /dev/sdg2 -t ext3 /mnt/external
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdg2,
       missing codepage or helper program, or other error
       In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
       dmesg | tail  or so

No luck, as you can tell! Any thoughts on that, or am I just going up the wrong tree completely?

(Off to read the mount manual, in the meantime!)

Edit: Have tried those commands in the order specified in man mount (mount -t type device dir), with the same outcome

Edit-the-edit: Problem possibly found; any ideas for a solution?

[root@neko neko]# mount -t auto /dev/sdg2 /mnt/external
mount: unknown filesystem type 'LVM2_member'

[stevea]

'ls -l /dev/mapper' may show the LVM logical partitions, assuming the
lvmdiskscan is another to try.

[Bazu135]

[root@neko neko]# ls -l /dev/mapper
total 0
crw-------. 1 root root 10, 236 Jan 26 17:27 control
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root       7 Jan 26 17:28 vg_neko00-lv_home -> ../dm-3
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root       7 Jan 26 17:28 vg_neko00-lv_root -> ../dm-1
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root       7 Jan 26 17:27 vg_neko00-lv_swap -> ../dm-0
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root       7 Jan 26 17:28 vg_neko-lv_home -> ../dm-5
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root       7 Jan 26 17:28 vg_neko-lv_root -> ../dm-4
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root       7 Jan 26 17:28 vg_neko-lv_swap -> ../dm-2

[root@neko neko]# lvmdiskscan
  /dev/vg_neko00/lv_swap [       5.44 GiB] 
  /dev/sda1              [     133.12 GiB] 
  /dev/vg_neko00/lv_root [      50.00 GiB] 
  /dev/sda2              [     500.00 MiB] 
  /dev/vg_neko/lv_swap   [       5.44 GiB] 
  /dev/sda3              [     233.36 GiB] LVM physical volume
  /dev/vg_neko00/lv_home [      42.84 GiB] 
  /dev/vg_neko/lv_root   [      50.00 GiB] 
  /dev/sda5              [     500.00 MiB] 
  /dev/vg_neko/lv_home   [     177.91 GiB] 
  /dev/sda6              [      98.30 GiB] LVM physical volume
  /dev/sdf1              [     931.51 GiB] 
  /dev/sdg1              [     200.00 MiB] 
  /dev/sdg2              [     111.59 GiB] LVM physical volume
  6 disks
  5 partitions
  0 LVM physical volume whole disks
  3 LVM physical volumes

The first command looks to have just listed bits from my F14 and F16 partitions, so I don't suppose that's given us anything helpful?

[DBelton]

what you need to do is mount the logical volumes listed above.

I am assuming that your F16 system is named neko (from looking at your output above) so your old F14 system is probably the logical volumes named neko00.

It also appears that they have already been mounted for you

your old (/) root: /dev/dm-1
your old /home: /dev/dm-3

/dev/dm-0 is your old swap, it won't contain anything useful to you.

If by chance the neko00 entries are your current F16 system, and the neko entires are your old F14 system:
/dev/dm-5 is the /home
/dev/dm-4 is (/) root

You can see if they got actually mounted by running the mount command, if they didn't get mounted,

mount -t auto /dev/dm-3 /mnt/oldhome

[Bazu135]

The trouble is, those aren't the volumes I'm trying to access - it's F12 on the external drive, which is /dev/sdg2 in the output above. 'ls -l /dev/mapper' didn't detect it.

[leigh123linux]

Have you tried system-config-lvm to mount it

su
yum install system-config-lvm

[Bazu135]

system-config-lvm detects /dev/sdg2 (the bit I'm after) as shown in the attached image. How would I go about mounting this?

[leigh123linux]

What does the logical view show?

[Bazu135]

As attached~

Just checked to make absolutely sure of it; vg_neko00 is my F16 installation.

[leigh123linux]

The F14 lvm names appear to be the same, bear in mind that I'm not a lvm guru (closer to beginner).

[Bazu135]

That does indeed appear to be the case... Might renaming the F12 partitions resolve this problem, then?