I have files on a hard drive and I can not access them.
I need help backing up the files from a hard drive. They are on a hard drive that was in my old fedora10 box. [ After booting, that computer freezes forever at the Fedora icon. So, I have taken the hard drive out and connected to an external enclosure. ] I want to access the files from an other computer via the enclosure. It seems like the files are in a logical volume:
/dev/sdc2 --> as determined by gparted
but I can not see them.
What should I do to access the data on this hard drive?
You need to 'mount' that partition, so that its contents are accessible through a directory on your filesystem.
To mount
/dev/sdc2, you first need to create this directory. As root:
(the /mnt folder is often used to contain various 'mount points' such as the one we are making now)
Now, mount the partition so that its contents show up in that new directory. Again, with root privileges:
Code:
mount /dev/sdc2 /mnt/olddrive
You can now browse to
/mnt/olddrive and access your files. You don't say what system you are using on this other computer, so there may be a nicer, graphical way to achieve this. This command line solution should always work, though, just as long as you have access to the root user, or can prefix those commands with sudo.
Thanks a million. Now I can get them!
I feel soooooo much like an idiot when the solution is generally simple!
You shouldn't feel like an idiot. Operating systems do this automatically for us almost all the time; it's hardly surprising that you weren't enlightened in how to do this manually! Glad it's sorted. :)
I'll echo Hybrid's comments - some OSes do this for us automatically, which discourages us from learning how it's done manually, so we then get caught out due to our over-reliance.
And far from feeling like an idiot - at least you feel like an enlightened one! A true idiot would rant about how it doesn't work and blame the OS, the disk, anything else - but never really ask HOW to get it done. So you don't really fit the profile of a typical idiot, sorry!
As an extension to this thread: these filesystems are usually mounted automatically if they're listed (with relevant information) in the /etc/fstab file - this directs Linux to do the work for us upon reboot.
Even if you DON'T want them to come online automatically, you can still list them there with "no" in the "mount" column, so that later on you can just type something like "mount /mnt/olddrive" and Linux will apply all settings accordingly. I used to do this for floppies, CDs, etc.
Hope that helps!