Can't mount /dev/hda3, now I'm '/home'less!

[Owen Townend]

On Thu, 2007-12-20 at 19:56 -0600, Tidball, John wrote:
> Owen,
> We downloaded server and when we tried to boot from the disk it says
> "unrecognized disk". Any help would be good.
> Thanks,
> John
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: ubuntu-users-bounces at lists.ubuntu.com
> <ubuntu-users-bounces at lists.ubuntu.com>
> To: Ubuntu user technical support,not for general discussions
> <ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com>
> Sent: Thu Dec 20 19:43:58 2007
> Subject: Re: Can't mount /dev/hda3, now I'm '/home'less!
> 
> 
> On Thu, 2007-12-20 at 15:46 -0500, Michael R. Head wrote:
> > On Fri, 2007-12-21 at 01:32 +1100, Owen Townend wrote:
> > > On Thu, 2007-12-20 at 07:12 -0500, Michael R. Head wrote:
> > > > > Seth
> > > > >
> > >
> > > Hey,
> > >   One thing you can try is using UUID lines in fstab instead
> of /dev
> > > addresses. Use vol_id to find the UUID and then the fstab line
> looks
> > > something like this:
> > >
> > > # Home partition, was /dev/hda2
> > > UUID=aadbde44-75cb-4fae-3dad-cf2a42d0be3d /home               ext3
> > > defaults,errors=remount-ro 0       1
> >
> > Well, if the lines in fstab were working, I wouldn't be in this
> mess,
> > now would I!
> >
> > So yeah, the UUID lines in fstab are in place and they match
> correctly
> > in according to /dev/disk/by-uuid/<UUID>
> >
> > So no luck.
> >
> > >   This should make it impervious to partitions moving around /dev
> as
> > > happens on occasion when adding new drives or fiddling in BIOS.
> >
> > Even so, "sudo mount /dev/<blah> /some/new/mount/point" really ought
> to
> > be working. And it ought not to be telling me that /dev/<blah> is
> > already mounted or that /some/new/mount/point is busy, when clearly
> > neither of these are the case.
> >
> > > cheers,
> > > Owen.
> > >
> > >
> 
> Hey,
>   Have you tried booting a live-cd and mounting it from there just to
> make sure it's not a completely separate issue?... hopefully not, but
> it
> would be worth ruling out.
> 
> cheers,
> Owen.
> 
> 
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> 

Hey,

  Rather than booting from the disk, have you tried booting from the CD
to a recovery console (server disk) or gui (desktop disk) and running
`file -s /dev/hda3` or `dd if=/dev/hda3 of=/dev/null` and/or mounting it
just to see if it can read from the disk when _nothing_ else has been
loaded that could possibly be accessing it? By doing this, you can
isolate the issue further. Whether you can mount within a live-cd or not
can help rule out or confirm lower level issues than fstab and mount.

cheers,
Owen.

p.s. example file -s output:
root at mattimeo:~# file -s /dev/hdb1
/dev/hdb1: Linux rev 1.0 ext3 filesystem data (needs journal recovery)
(large files)