John Williams wrote, On 13/05/09 11:57:
I gave this disk to my son to use as a backup. It had a Linux distro on
it but that was removed, or so we thought. (He formatted the disk with
Win2000 "format") For some time my son says he could access the disc and
he put all his data files on this disk!
Sounds like he formatted a partition on the disk, rather than the whole
disk.
Try
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/something -t ntfs
mount /dev/sda3 /mnt/something -t ntfs
mount /dev/sda4 /mnt/something -t ntfs
and see what happens - the partition ID doesn't necessarily mean it
contains that filesystem.
Also try
smartctl -a /dev/sda
and look for errors.
Now he cannot access them.
This is what I find using fdisk:
[r...@localhost blue]# fdisk -l /dev/sda
Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xabea72d4
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 2089 4191 16881607 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 2102 13907 94821242 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 2089 4178 16777472 0 Empty
Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda4 2089 4178 16777472 0 Empty
Partition 4 does not end on cylinder boundary.
--
Craig Falconer
