I'm trying to recover some data from a hard drive extracted from a broken laptop, and I'm having problems mounting the disk to my current system (Linux Mint). The hard disk I'm recovering from ran Debian. Simply, I'm confused as to how I can mount the hard drive to access the files, however it's not as simple as any other mount I've done. The following details struggles and information I've encountered.
I get the following outputs when trying to mount the hard drive with different file-system tags. I should add that the file-system type isn't automatically detected when using auto, and "sdb" is definitely the correct address for the disk (taken it from dmesg).
$ mount /dev/sdb /mnt/usb -t ntfs
NTFS signature is missing.
Failed to mount '/dev/sdb': Invalid argument
The device '/dev/sdb' doesn't seem to have a valid NTFS.
Maybe the wrong device is used? Or the whole disk instead of a
partition (e.g. /dev/sda, not /dev/sda1)? Or the other way around?
The following returns the same message when all other common file-system tags are used:
$ sudo mount /dev/sdb usb -t ext2
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so
The results from these commands led me to believe that there was an issue with the hard disk and it's partitions, however fdisk proved that it's partition's do seem to be valid and correct:
$ sudo fdisk /dev/sdb -l
Disk /dev/sdb: 250.1 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders, total 488397168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0002da94
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 2048 475920383 237959168 83 Linux
/dev/sdb2 475922430 488396799 6237185 5 Extended
/dev/sdb5 475922432 488396799 6237184 82 Linux swap / Solaris
I then decided to try verify the file-system type of the hard drive, which seems to be "devtmpfs", which I got from the following command using df:
$ df /dev/sdb -T
Filesystem Type 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
udev devtmpfs 1014764 4 1014760 1% /dev
And so finally, I mount the hard drive using -t devtmpfs, which is successful in mounting however I'm left with a confusing file system very unlike from what I would expect from what was a standard debian set up.
It contains file folders such as "block","bus","char","disk","dri","mapper"... and files like "sda1","sdb","sdb1","tty","vcs".
I'm totally stumped as to how I should progress, and I'm pretty convinced the hard disk isn't broken and that I'm just mounting it incorrectly. How can I successfully mount the disk so I can access my files? Any help would be greatly appreciated.