trying to get sda6 as readable - SOLVED

[geezer]

Installed Kubuntu, 7.10 a few days ago.

New computer, old one died.

Salvaged the Hard Drive from the old one. I had been running FC5 on that machine. It was automatically setup to use a logical volume manager and the ext3 journaling file system

It was dual boot with Windows XP.

Installed the HD from the old machine into the current machine.

QTparted shows the following partitions on the drive:

• sda1 ext3 -- I think this partition was used by FC5 for the Logical volume manager, but has been reformated by Kubuntu
• sda2 ntfs --- the windows XP partition
• sda3 extended -- contains sda5 and sda6 below
• sda5 fat32 -- used before for communicating between FC5 and XP
• sda6 - unknown ---- I think this partition was used by FC5 for the ext3 journaling file system

Also have 2 more HDs that came with the machine:
sdb - Windows Vista
sdc - was nfts before I installed Kubuntu, but I had Kubuntu reformat as ext3 for Linux use - has the swap partition on it.

I think that all of my old data which I am trying to recover is on that sda6 partition

problem is that when I installed Kubuntu, it used sda as the boot disk and when I used qtparted to make sda6 active, sda1 became inactive and the machine then booted from Vista on sdb automatically then. I had to boot from the the Live CD, boot qtparted to reset sda1 as active, which made sda6 inactive,so that I could again boot from sda1 into Kubuntu.

So, my question - how do I make sda6 readable without making sda1 inactive I guess what I want is for sda1 and sda6 to both be active, but I don't think that qtparted will do that .

[integr8e]

Re: trying to get sda6 as readable

Run the following commands

sudo mkdir /media/sda6

ls -lah /dev/disk/by-uuid

make note of sda6's uuid (should be in blue)

kdesudo kate /etc/fstab

That should open your fstab in Kate. Once there, enter the following line:

UUID=[uuid for sda6] /media/sda6 ext3 defaults 0 1

Save and close Kate, logout, press Alt+E to restart X.org, login, and your sda6 partition should be mounted in /media/sda6

[Detonate]

Re: trying to get sda6 as readable

Here's a thread from the Fedora Forum I started about a year ago that may help. I'm no longer using fedora, so I had forgotten about this problem.

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/forum/...d.php?t=146410

[geezer]

Re: trying to get sda6 as readable

Run the following commands

sudo mkdir /media/sda6

ls -lah /dev/disk/by-uuid

make note of sda6's uuid (should be in blue)

kdesudo kate /etc/fstab

That should open your fstab in Kate. Once there, enter the following line:

UUID=[uuid for sda6] /media/sda6 ext3 defaults 0 1

Save and close Kate, logout, press Alt+E to restart X.org, login, and your sda6 partition should be mounted in /media/sda6

The sda6 partition doesn't showup in the "ls" command. Here's the output:

ls -lah /dev/disk/by-uuid
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 160 2008-01-08 12:25 .
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 120 2008-01-08 12:25 ..
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2008-01-08 12:25 0b2d91b1-b6cc-4e27-b5b5-abdeb124b59d -> ../../sdc1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2008-01-08 12:25 13422d59-d8d9-4605-859b-2acfb706f383 -> ../../sdc5
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2008-01-08 12:25 3DAC-5B47 -> ../../sda5
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2008-01-08 12:25 5070FD2F70FD1D02 -> ../../sdb1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2008-01-08 12:25 77aef1ed-5211-4f24-814a-1f0cc7f9f9b6 -> ../../sda1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2008-01-08 12:25 BEF0025FF0021E71 -> ../../sda2

Tried booting qtparted and setting sda6 active which sets sda1 inactive and commited the change. Same results from "ls". Logged out, A-E to reboot X-Window and logged in. Same results. Tried to set sda1 back to active with QTprted - couldn't. Had to restart and boot from the Live CD, boot QTParted and then it allowed me to reset sda1 as active, which then sets sda6 as inactive. Restarted. That makes 3 time through that routine. My heart cannot take the suspense anymore ... waiting for the Live CD to boot, booting QTParted and finding out if it will reset sda1 as active, then restarting and waiting for Grub to boot and then waiting for Kubuntu to boot. All the while hoping that I can recover and get back to square 1 at least. Have so far, but don't know if I care to go through that again unless I really have to.

So I am still unable to do anything with that sda6 partition where all of my data resides.

Detonate - haven't had time to really study that thread you posted. Read through real quick and not too sure I really understand everything.

Anybody else

[Detonate]

Re: trying to get sda6 as readable

Skip the first part of the thread and go down to about message #7 and start reading. Basically, what it tells you is that you have to install lvm on you Kubuntu system, then you will be able to mount your old Logical Volume that was created by Fedora. A couple of the posts include the fstab entries you will need. I don't know why Fedora defaults to LVM during installation, as it is not really needed by most home users. Better to just use ext3 IMHO.

[integr8e]

Re: trying to get sda6 as readable

And if that doesn't work, try the command

sudo vol_id /dev/sda6

I used that command for my /dev/sda3 partition, and this is its output:

~$ sudo vol_id /dev/sda3
ID_FS_USAGE=filesystem
ID_FS_TYPE=xfs
ID_FS_VERSION=
ID_FS_UUID=749d954b-a115-4808-b17c-62a0e40f073a
ID_FS_UUID_ENC=749d954b-a115-4808-b17c-62a0e40f073a
ID_FS_LABEL=
ID_FS_LABEL_ENC=
ID_FS_LABEL_SAFE=

The output shows me its UUID is "749d954b-a115-4808-b17c-62a0e40f073a". You can also use "vol_id" to identify the UUID's of removable media.

[geezer]

Re: trying to get sda6 as readable

Skip the first part of the thread and go down to about message #7 and start reading. Basically, what it tells you is that you have to install lvm on you Kubuntu system, then you will be able to mount your old Logical Volume that was created by Fedora. A couple of the posts include the fstab entries you will need. I don't know why Fedora defaults to LVM during installation, as it is not really needed by most home users. Better to just use ext3 IMHO.

followed your advice and read from #7 on.

eceuted: sudo apt-get install lvm2

then sudo gvscan

sudo vgscan
Reading all physical volumes. This may take a while...
Found volume group "VolGroup00" using metadata type lvm2

then sudo lvscan

sudo lvscan
/proc/misc: No entry for device-mapper found
Is device-mapper driver missing from kernel?
Failure to communicate with kernel device-mapper driver.
/proc/misc: No entry for device-mapper found
Is device-mapper driver missing from kernel?
Failure to communicate with kernel device-mapper driver.
Incompatible libdevmapper 1.02.20 (2007-06-15)(compat) and kernel driver
inactive '/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00' [92.94 GB] inherit
inactive '/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01' [1.94 GB] inherit

then

sudo mount -t ext3 /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 /media/FC5_Data
mount: special device /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 does not exist

since sda6 is inactive, the commands cannot mount.

Hmmm . do I have to run QTParted again and make sda6 active, logout, A-E, login and try again?

[Detonate]

Re: trying to get sda6 as readable

Yep, the partition (sda6) needs to be active. I think you can do that in "Administrator Mode" with the "Disk and File Systems" module under "System Setting" without rebooting.

[geezer]

Re: trying to get sda6 as readable

Yep, the partition (sda6) needs to be active. I think you can do that in "Administrator Mode" with the "Disk and File Systems" module under "System Setting" without rebooting.

made sda6 active using QTParted

committed change

no change in lvscan output

also "ls -lah /dev/disk/by-uuid" did not list sda6

logged out, rebooted X-Windows with A-E and logged back in.

Again no change.

sda6 just does not show up, no uuid listed.

rebooted in Live CD, used QTParted again to set sda1 active and restarted to get evrything back.

Am going to try downloading Fedora Core 8 Live CD and booting from that to see if the LVM under Fedora Core 8 can recognize the partition.

[Detonate]

Re: trying to get sda6 as readable

When I did this, I was using Edgy and FC6. Maybe some thing has changed since then. When you installed the lvm2 program, did you also install everything associated with lvm? That's what I had to do to get it to work. Do a search and install everything that has lvm in the title. These are mostly small programs and won't use a lot of disk space IIRC.

[geezer]

Re: trying to get sda6 as readable

Okay - What I wanted to accomplish is to recover all that data on the HD from my old computer which had died (power supply). I had removed the HD from the old computer and installed on the new computer in addition to the HDs that came with the new computer.

The solution turned out to be very simply in execution:

• download Fedora Core 8 KDE Live CD
• burn Fedora Core Live CD - had to boot Windows Vista for this - couldn't find anything under Linux to burn an iso CD. K3B says it can burn an iso DVD, but don't know about a CD
• reboot from Fedora Core 8 KDE Live CD
• Took less than 2 minutes to locate the Logical Volume Manager, LVM, on the "system" options. Booted LVM
• LVM scanned and came up with a list of the logical volumes - sda6 was the only logical volume listed. Clicked on the logical volumes and expanded those available and then clicked on volume 0 (forget the logical volume name)
• clicked on the logical volume "properties" and clicked on "mount" box and filled in mount point
• LVM created the mount point and mounted the logical volume
• booted Konqueror and opened the mount point directory -------
  .
  .
  .
  Ohhhh - what a beautiful sight - all of the directories and files on the old computer HD were right there from "/" on up. Navigated through the directories to insure that they were all there. Yep EVERYTHING was there --- HOG HEAVEN
  .
  .
  .
  
• booted K3B and started burning DVDs - thank God I opted for the machine with 2 DVD reader/writers - the Fedora Core 8 Live CD has to stay in the boot DVD reader, so I could use the second DVD writer to burn everything I needed to DVDs on the second DVD writer
• exit the Fedora Core 8 Live CD and boot Kubuntu and start copying from the Backup DVDs

Ahh all of that data is now residing on the new Kubuntu HD.

Heart attack no longer a worry.

I'll keep the old HD as is for some time to insure that I got everything that I needed. If not I can always reboot from the Fedora Core 8 KDE Live CD , mount the Logical Volume and burn more DVDs.

So, if anybody is moving from Fedora Core or away from the Logical Volume Management for similar reasons, that is the procedure. Fairly simple in execution.

When sure that I have everything, in a couple of months, I may reformat the old HD to reclaim the storage space - only want to do that because the old HD is in a lockable/removable carrier, that I can lock inplace or unlock and remove and put under separate lock and key for security - 120 GB of removable backup.