I’ve got some old family computers and I’m trying to take an image of the hard drives onto my modern machine for archival purposes. I’ve had success for the most part, but one particular hard drive is giving me issues.
I have a USB to IDE/SATA converter, so I am removing the hard drives and powering them with a power supply, but they interface with my fedora machine over USB.
One particular hard drive will not mount. It appears to be recognized but I can’t figure out it’s filesystem. It appears to have multiple partitions, but the computer the drive came out of is very old (Compaq Presario 1672) so I don’t recall anything about how it is set up. Anyone ran into something like this before?
Here’s the output of lsblk, the hard drive I am trying to access is sdc
josh@Desktop:~$ lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda 8:0 0 1.8T 0 disk
└─sda1 8:1 0 1.8T 0 part /run/media/josh/HDD
sdb 8:16 0 931.5G 0 disk
└─sdb1 8:17 0 931.5G 0 part /mnt/SSD
sdc 8:32 0 6G 0 disk
├─sdc1 8:33 0 4.5G 0 part
├─sdc2 8:34 0 1K 0 part
└─sdc5 8:37 0 1.5G 0 part
zram0 251:0 0 8G 0 disk [SWAP]
nvme0n1 259:0 0 238.5G 0 disk
├─nvme0n1p1 259:1 0 600M 0 part /boot/efi
├─nvme0n1p2 259:2 0 1G 0 part /boot
└─nvme0n1p3 259:3 0 236.9G 0 part /home
/
When I attempt to find the filesystem of sdc I do not see any information.
If I try to open a partition manager (tried KDE Partition manager and GParted), it gets stuck on scanning sdc. Also if I try to mount via cli it locks up as well.
Thanks for any and all help in getting this drive mounted.
This command does not appear to be working unfortunately. Terminal was locked up after I typed my password. Eventually (15 minutes later) it spat out a response.
josh@Desktop:~$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdc
[sudo] password for josh:
fdisk: cannot open /dev/sdc: Input/output error
Worth noting, the old laptop does boot with the hard drive installed so the drive is functional.
I did just run file -s and got a “no read permission” output so maybe that’s what’s going on. Not sure how to fix that yet.
josh@Desktop:~$ file -s /dev/sdc
/dev/sdc: no read permission
If you run mount | grep sdc is will display if any of the partitions on the drive are mounted or not, as well as the mount point. (no results means not mounted)
Run that command first with the device not attached, then attach it and repeat the mount command to see if there is a difference.
Most times fedora will mount a usb device at /run/media/$USER/device. However, when there are multiple partitions it may be that not all or even none may be mounted. It is even worthwhile to note that unplugging and reattaching a usb device may result in a different device name being assigned to the same device.
The best tool to identify if the drive is even seen is sudo fdisk -l which should show the details of every attached drive. Then use that information to verify the mount or mount it manually see what the content is.
Note that the ‘lsblk’ command you used clearly showed sdcX partitions were not mounted, which was also shown with lsblk -f which provides details of mounted file systems.
Similarly df is only able to show details of mounted file systems.
Thus it appears that the device is probably properly seen but is not automatically mounted so you must manually mount each partition before you can access the content.
Thanks for the information on how these tools work, makes a little more sense now.
Manually mounting does not appear to work. Using the mount command just locks up the terminal and there’s is no GUI elements showing the drive to try mounting anywhere but the command line.
In a DOS-type partition table the starting offset and the size of each partition is stored in two ways: as an absolute number of sectors (given in 32 bits), and as a Cylinders/Heads/Sectors triple (given in 10+8+6 bits). The former is OK — with 512-byte sectors this will work up to 2 TB. The latter has two problems. First, these C/H/S fields can be filled only when the number of heads and the number of sectors per track are known. And second, even if we know what these numbers should be, the 24 bits that are available do not suffice. DOS uses C/H/S only, Windows uses both, Linux never uses C/H/S. The C/H/S addressing is deprecated and may be unsupported in some later fdisk version.
I wonder if a disk from a machine of this vintage (probably running Windows 98?) uses partitioning that modern Linux tools struggle to read.
You might check to see if that old disk is using disk compression … As I recall, when running W98(?) you could set the system to compress the contents of the disk to save space …I think it was either call DriveSpace or DoubleSpace … either way, you can’t read the disk contents directly with Linux (or at least I haven’t found a way to do that… :-)) What you can do is make a raw disk image of the drive start the image as a QEMU/KVM virtual machine in Linux …
Something like:
dd if=/dev/sdc of=/home/FOO/Windows98.DD <==== this file would be your raw disk image
use KVM/QEMU to create a VM from the disk image and see where things go from there
3)(?) use SAMBA to mount a local FS from W98 and copy your stuff there?
3)(?) use putty in the W98 VM and sftp/scp your files to a Linx FS?
You probably have a Windows 8 FAT filesystem, but there were many variants — see:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table#FAT16B.
If you can find an OS installer you might be able to run the original OS in a VM. Then try to create a image of the drive for use in the VM.
Thanks everyone for all the help. Still no luck unfortunately. Here’s what I have tried between my last comment and this one.
Locks up the terminal, never gives an output unfortunately.
The first command locks up the terminal as well so I haven’t been able to get to the VM stage.
I tried troubleshooting via dmesg so here is that output after connecting the device. Note that this is a different hard drive from the original message, but it’s a very similarly aged computer running the same operating system and it is behaving identically to what I have already posted. It is a larger size however. I thought I may have better luck with a different hard drive (these are the 2 trouble drives, all others have worked great).
[34919.672363] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdc] Attached SCSI disk
[35190.437358] usb 2-3: new SuperSpeed USB device number 18 using xhci_hcd
[35190.453321] usb 2-3: New USB device found, idVendor=1f75, idProduct=0611, bcdDevice= 0.06
[35190.453326] usb 2-3: New USB device strings: Mfr=4, Product=5, SerialNumber=6
[35190.453329] usb 2-3: Product: XT-U33502
[35190.453331] usb 2-3: Manufacturer: XinTop
[35190.453333] usb 2-3: SerialNumber: 20480810
[35190.463637] usb-storage 2-3:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
[35190.463796] scsi host8: usb-storage 2-3:1.0
[35191.493220] scsi host8: scsi scan: INQUIRY result too short (5), using 36
[35191.493228] scsi 8:0:0:0: Direct-Access XinTop XT-U33502 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0
[35191.493500] sd 8:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
[35221.960500] usb 2-3: reset SuperSpeed USB device number 18 using xhci_hcd
[35221.986435] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdc] 160086528 512-byte logical blocks: (82.0 GB/76.3 GiB)
[35221.987992] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdc] Write Protect is off
[35221.987995] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdc] Mode Sense: 3b 00 00 00
[35221.989964] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdc] No Caching mode page found
[35221.989967] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through
[35252.170286] usb 2-3: reset SuperSpeed USB device number 18 using xhci_hcd
[35282.382570] usb 2-3: reset SuperSpeed USB device number 18 using xhci_hcd
[35312.585611] usb 2-3: reset SuperSpeed USB device number 18 using xhci_hcd
The “reset SuperSpeed USB device number 18 using xhci_hcd” comes through approximately once a minute. I could confirm with the original devices booted that this hard drive belongs to a Windows XP machine (it did not come with XP), and the drive is formatted FAT32 but I can’t see that anywhere in Fedora.
I understand I can grab files from the original computers when they are booted but I would really like to be able to image the whole drive to be consistent with my archival methods.
I’ve had USB 3.0+ disconnects with a USB-C dock on two computers with the included cables (been over a year but they were fine before); switching to a short unrelated cable seems fine. Had to redo a couple overnight NAS restores to figure that out (dmesg had a flood of USB and filesystem errors after a while)
If USB-C is involved anywhere I’d try flipping the end. One of my laptops only does USB 3 speeds if the C cable itself is connected a certain way in the C-to-A adapter on the laptop and the HDD itself (my other native-C laptop handles any direction; HDD transfers seemed fine on the longer cables at slower USB2 speed)
My experience (years ago) with SCSI drives (from PC, VAX, and SGI systems) was that “standards” were not honoured. Some drives didn’t work with some SCSI controllers. USB adapters were problematic, but we had access to several SCSI controller cards we could swap into PC’s. There were also issues with bus termination and proper grounding for external drives when using multiple power sources. We had one known good ground point and connections to that from each separately powered unit.
(