Problem mounting fat32 within rescue-remix
I may be a complete nub, and I am fairly new to Ubuntu and Unix in general, but...
I am attempting to mount my 160GB WD Passport external (formatted FAT32, single partition) from within the Ubuntu-rescue-remix environment and it is failing miserably.
My situation:
Physical damage has rendered my boot partition (a FAT32 Windows partition) and MBR useless.
My damaged drive is:
sda1 - the FAT32 windows partition, 40GB
sda2 - the ext3 partition with my Ubuntu install and the files I want to save, 19GB
sda3 - my swap partition, 1GB
Using the rescue disk, I've been able to find that my partition structure is still there. I'd like to be able to use gnuddrescue to pull an image to my external, but I can't mount it.
When I attempt to mount, using this command:
sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sdb1 /media/usbdrv
I get this error:
mount: unknown filesystem type 'vfat'
I also tried using type 'msdos' but it didn't like that either. I am wondering if there is something missing from the Rescue disk that won't allow me to mount as per usual?
My next step is going to be to create an ext3 partition on my external of sufficient size to hold the image from my ext3 partition, but I'd like to know why the mounting isn't working currently.
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Ummm... hmm... It seems that
Ummm... hmm... It seems that running testdisk and re-writing the partition table, and then restarting fixed the problem. I think it was in the fact that when trying to boot, it was giving a ton of errors and failing due to problems with my bad hard drive. I remember seeing several boot tasks failing. Restarting has fixed my mounting problem and I am pulling files to my external as we speak. Sorry for the extraneous post. Not sure what I'd done w/o these utils. Couldn't get anything to come up before, not even the Ubuntu 7.4 live CD.
I'm glad everything is
I'm glad everything is working for you.
One thing to take note of, a filesystem image is one big file. A VFAT (msdos) filesystem cannot handle files greater than 4 gigs in size. A FAT filesystem is not suitable for storing the image.
I will add that to the documentation.
Thanks!
I have a problem with a
I have a problem with a 250GWD EXT drive it was FAT32 and yesterday i tryed to open it it tells i need to conver it and i saw it is in raw type not fat. I have 230 G in and i cant aford losing them is ther anything ican do to save them?
Your drive seems to have
Your drive seems to have hardware issues. You should try to image it and recover any data you can from that image.
Obtain a drive that has enough space to store the image file (250Gigs) and format it to NTFS or ext3 (linux). Fat32 cannot handle large files like that.
Run ddrescue using ubuntu-rescue-remix.
See the documentation page for examples of how to use ddrescue.
Once you get an image of your drive, try to mount the filesystemn on it. But first, get to work on saving your data.