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n00b needs help getting ubuntu to read D: drive

Asked by risephoenixrise

I indeed have a second hard drive on my PC, but ubuntu is not recognizing it. How do I get the OS to talk to it?

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pablitofuerte (pablitofuerte) said : 		#1

Some more info is needed.
Please, open a terminal and type (or copy&paste)

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Tom (tom6) said : 		#2

In Ubuntu go up to the top taskbar and click on "Places" you should find the D: 'drive' there, easily distinguishable by some helpful name such as "20 Gb Media", sometimes if you have a lot of "media" it hepfully puts them all in a sub menu about halfway down "Places" ;)

Hope this helps!
Good luck and happy hunting
Regards from
Tom :)

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pablitofuerte (pablitofuerte) said : 		#3

Some more info is needed.
Please, open a terminal and type (or copy&paste)

sudo fdisk -l

You will see a list of your partitions (hardrive devices). Something like this:

/dev/sda1 * 1 34898 280318153+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 37706 38913 9701376 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 34899 37705 22547227+ 5 Extendida
/dev/sda5 34899 35094 1574338+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6 35095 36399 10482381 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 36400 37705 10490413+ 83 Linux

You got to identify you D: drive. (if listed means that OS recognize it). Usually drives-partitions are "mounted" automatically, if not you have to mount then manually or configure the system to do it by itself on startup.
Please type "mount" on a terminal, the you will see all partitions already mounted.
You will see anything like this (although larger:

$ mount
/dev/sda6 on / type ext3 (rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro)
/dev/sda7 on /home type ext3 (rw,relatime)
........
........

Please, reply with some more info, with the output of this two terminal orders, to give you more instructions.

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risephoenixrise (risephoenixrise) said : 		#4

My second hard drive does not appear under the "places" menu whatsoever.

I typed the "sudo fdisk -l" command on terminal. This is what it read:

/dev/sda1 * 1 9327 74919096 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 9328 9729 3229065 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 9328 9729 3229033+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris

I typed the "mount" command on terminal. This is what it read:

/dev/sda1 on / type ext3 (rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro)
tmpfs on /lib/init/rw type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,mode=0755)
proc on /proc type proc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
varrun on /var/run type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,mode=0755)
varlock on /var/lock type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,mode=1777)
udev on /dev type tmpfs (rw,mode=0755)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=620)
fusectl on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw)
lrm on /lib/modules/2.6.28-13-generic/volatile type tmpfs (rw,mode=755)
securityfs on /sys/kernel/security type securityfs (rw)
binfmt_misc on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
gvfs-fuse-daemon on /home/risephoenixrise/.gvfs type fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon (rw,nosuid,nodev,user=risephoenixrise)

Bear in mind I am a n00b, so I need to be walked through from here.

Some hardware information for you:
I am running Ubuntu from an Acer Aspire 3050 laptop. Originally it had Windows Vista on the C: drive and a D: drive as the second hard drive. That D: drive is what I am trying to read.

More help, please...

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Best Tom (tom6) said : 		#5

Oh dear. I take it that you are not able to boot into Windows at all? It looks as though you meant to wipe out Windows and replace it with Ubuntu but wanted to keep the D: drive with data on it? Sadly from

/dev/sda1 * 1 9327 74919096 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 9328 9729 3229065 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 9328 9729 3229033+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris

we can see there are no "ntfs" partitions which means you D: 'drive' has been deleted. It's unlikely you can get the data back at this point but to have any hope of recovering data, if it really can't be reconstructed from back-ups or original sources then you need to use "Data Recovery" techniques. The main priority, especially given that the linux-swap is at the end of the drive, is to switch off the machine. Then get into here from a different machine and start reading

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DataRecovery

Note by switch off i don't mean use "sleep" or "hibernate" modes as these write data back to the disk. A full proper shutdown is needed.

I would personally then want to take the drive out of the machine so that i could hook it up as the slave drive inside another machine (or as an external non-booting drive) to avoid any further "writes to the drive", even booting up will write to some parts of the drive but continued use certainly will (and probably mainly to where D: is buried).

As a noob i would really consider the data lost, this happens sometimes in the world of computers and is often desperately sad and frustrating, hence people keep talking about backing everything up :( However, there are some data recovery companies and some people you might find locally who specialise in this sort of thing locally (they wont advertise it but they usually have a good knowledge of linux too). They usually charge a small fortune, which is why i say consider the data lost. It might be worth finding out about charges tho and then weigh up whether it's worth it.

I'm sorry about your loss
Regards from
Tom

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risephoenixrise (risephoenixrise) said : 		#6

Thanks for your help everyone.

This stinks. I guess I'll do what I need to do.

If anyone sees any alternative, please message me.

Michael

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Tom (tom6) said : 		#7

Yeh, if it helps to know at all i have a bunch of drives i need to work on but it was mainly Windows stuffing up so i know the data is probably there. 60Gb of carefully selected music, some extremely rare or very obscure and in genre's i wouldn't know where to start looking, some great hip-hop, early punk (not just shout-y ones), bands like "Strawberry Switchblade" and "Violent Femmes", an almost complete Beatles collection, half of "Pink Floydd" (misses "The Wall" and "The Dark Side of the Moon" amongst others) some Bob Marley, again not the one album that everyone has, a ton of heavy-metal from before that hit the mainstream, there was a lot of dire stuff but some very good tracks and great bands. Another drive had movies like "I Bought A Vampire Motorcycle" and "Cold Dog Soup", ok there were a ton of Voyager episodes that i've most managed to get re-find so it's just the rare obscure stuff i wanted to keep that's gone. I had spent ages tweaking Windows (mostly Xp) with some great themes with nice icon sets and good backgrounds including great bootup screens, and with Windows running unbelievably fast - i know all that's easy in linux but getting it sorted in Windows wasn't trivial. Also there's a load of half finished projects for work that either meant several all-nighters trying to re-create and one that helped me get the sack because i couldn't get the work complete within the dead-line, so that'll be nice to see :(

My plan is to get a massive drive and then use GPart (not gparted) and a ton of other data recovery tools to try to get it all back together on one drive, preferably using the safer ext3 or maybe ext4 but definitely not Windows' ntfs. Then i can reformat the old drives and see if they're ok to reuse to back the data up onto them and wrap one in foil, inside the clam-shell (protective case the large hard-drive is posted in) and put it somewhere safe, a long way from me.

You're definitely not alone although it's fairly rare for the problem to have been caused via linux usually the problems occur within Windows systems and then linux tools usually recover it all easily. It's almost always very gutting to lose stuff.

Good luck from
Tom