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Re: Need Help restoring a filesystem on an external drive WD 'My Book'



On 26.11.2017 14:37, bd wrote:

Hi to Everyone,

My

WD P/N : WD10000H 1Q

S/N : WCAU4D 164675

is about 4 or 5 years old. It is an external drive using external power supply. At start, I had formatted it in ext3, so that I 'd be able to storage videofiles larger than 2 Gb. Since then, I storaged a number of files in several directories, subdirectories etc.. I never had any problem until now.

This drive no longer mounts. It does not mount automatically as it used to, and I don't know how to mount it manually. My other similar drives mount on /dev/sdb1 or /dev/sr0... depending on to which computer I mount it. In case it doesn't automatically mount, I just type :

#mount /dev/sdb1 /media/bd/ext

and it works

but right now I don't know for sure the device name to mount.

If I list my /dev directory using ls -lt, I can see what new device appears in the list whenever I plug my external drive. It shows 'sdb'. Not 'sdb1' as for other external drives, just 'sdb'. If now I type :

# mount /dev/sdb /media/bd/ext

this gets the external drive to react : the light goes up and down for awhile, and then I get this message :

'you must specify the filesystem'

But, if I try :

# mount -t ext3 /dev/sdb /media/bd/ext

I get this : 'wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb…'

same result if I try mounting on 'fat', 'msdos'… filesystems, but I doubt if there are any FAT or msdos space left on this device since I had reformated it to ext3.

At last, I tried :

# fsck /dev/sdb (the external drive starts to light, then :

'fsck ext2 : superblock invalid. Trying to backup blocks

fsck ext2 : bad magic number in superblock while trying to open /dev/sdb

Now, if I type :

cat /proc/scsi/scsi

I get this :

scsi0 ATA MAXTOR STM

scsi1 ATA MAXTOR STM

scsi5 WD My Book Direct Access


/etc/fstab

does not show any sdb device

How am I to get this drive back to operation, or, at least, to recuperate the datafiles that are stored in that WD external drive ?

Thanks in advance to tell me what diagnosis and repair tools I could use

Bernard

You have to specify partition to mount not whole disk device.
First of all check if you got disk name right (they could mix up on boot time):
    # blkid
After that, right mount command should be like this:
    # mount -t ext3 /dev/sdb1 /media/bd/ext
If you suspect disk could be failing, you can mount it as read-only, to see if it will mount cleanly:
    # mount -t ext3 -o ro /dev/sdb1 /media/bd/ext
To check unmounted ext3 filesystem of partition 1 you should type:
    # fsck.ext3 /dev/sdb1

-- 
With kindest regards, Alexander.

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