input output error

[John Van Ostrand]

On Mon, 2007-07-09 at 23:57 -0400, hui xu wrote:
> Could anybody tell me how to recover the data from my
> harddisk? My problem is:
> 
> I have stored all my photoes and software in an
> harddisk connected by USB to my linux box. I have not
> used it for half year. recently I try to mount ( mount
> -a /dev/sda /bigfoot) it to my linux box to get the
> data, I got the errors "/dev/sda: Input/output error 
> mount: you must specify the filesystem type"

In your commands you are using /dev/sda which refers to the entire disk
which includes the boot sector, partition table and all partitions.
Normally disks are partitioned and devices like /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2,
etc are used to access the partitions.

Your use of the mount command isn't correct either. The -a flag is for
mounting all file systems specified in /etc/fstab.

You should first try this:

fdisk -l /dev/sda

If any partitions show up then try mounting those individually. 

	mount /dev/sda1 /bigfoot

You should be very careful about using whole disk devices. If you write
to them you generally overwrite the boot sectors and partition tables
and things get pretty mucked up from there.

Other things to consider is that the hard disk may use Logical Volume
Manager. Try running 'pvdisplay /dev/sda' to see if the disk is setup as
a LVM physical volume. Again it's likely that it's partitioned so trying
'pvcreate /dev/sda1' is generally more normal. If software RAID is also
in place then it might be /dev/md0, or /dev/md1, etc.


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