mount slave drive

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Sep 18, 2007 at 01:08:24PM -0400, Chris Aitken wrote:
> If I chose the filesystem it would have been ext3. Sometimes they are 
> auto-assigned Vol-something (I don't understand that system).
>
> one
>
> I'm not familiar with LVM (I choose No whenever offered that) and 
> certainly it's not RAID.
>
> I didn't choose anything exotic.
>
> It's still on IDE 1 as slave (I checked that it's still jumpered to slave).

So everything says there should be something simple to find, yet
everything is acting as if the drive was overwritten by zeros pretty
much.

> [root at p733 chris]# /sbin/fdisk -l /dev/sdb
> 
> Disk /dev/sdb: 10.0 GB, 10005037056 bytes
> 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1216 cylinders
> Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
> 
>   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
> /dev/sdb1   *           1           1           0    0  Empty
> Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
> 
> [root at p733 chris]# dd if=/dev/sdb of=/tmp/sdb.scan bs=512 count=100 
> skip=63;file /tmp/sdb.scan
> 100+0 records in
> 100+0 records out
> 51200 bytes (51 kB) copied, 0.0327913 s, 1.6 MB/s
> /tmp/sdb.scan: data

Hmm.  Well given the geometry of the drive, that is where any first
partition would normally start.  For example I get:

lennartsorensen:~# dd if=/dev/sda of=/tmp/scan bs=512 count=100 skip=63
100+0 records in
100+0 records out
51200 bytes (51 kB) copied, 0.000804977 seconds, 63.6 MB/s
lennartsorensen:~# file /tmp/scan
/tmp/scan: Linux rev 1.0 ext3 filesystem data (needs journal recovery)

If you open the /tmp file created in a hex editor is it all 00s or FFs
or a bunch of random data?

You could try and repeat the dd/file command increasing the skip by 63
at a time, and see if it finds a partition somewhere.  Of course if
there was an ext3 filesystem there, gpart should have found it.  It is
very good at finding those.

So what kind of files were on the drive before?

--
Len Sorensen
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