Linux Mint Cinnamon Victoria, OEM motherboard, OEM desktop computer.

My HDD will not boot despite using fsck etc. The boot files seem to be damaged, and I had previously noticed that it had a lot of bad sectors. I believe it needs replacing with a new HDD. Thankfully I have a guarantee.

Currently I am writing this using the installation disk from the DVD drive, but the operating system is only running in memory and I do not know how to get access to the physical HDD so that I can copy files.

Question: How do I get access to the physical HDD please? Ideally I would like to copy files to another HDD on the same computer.

I also have a Linux Mint Cinnamon Vanessa installation disk, and a few others. I can also download and burn dvd disks using an old laptop if necessary.

I recently bought this "new" desktop computer that is a mixture of new and old components, but the HDD is in bad condition.

Thanks.

Update: I have found some other SATA drives in my old non-working computers that I kept for spares. If I physically install one of these drives in the new computer would it at least be possible to see what files are on it before I destroy them by installing an OS over them?

grumpyskeptic,

This should do the trick:
https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...al-data-38094/

Look at the 3 screenshots just to familiarise yourself with the layout.

Regarding your update:

Yes, it should be possible to access data on those SATA drives in the same way as above.

I would concentrate on copying your personal data from your current drive first.

All you need do is mount your internal drive & copy files to an external drive - once you have your files, you could try adding/installing a superblock to it, to see if it will still function OK.

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=ins...n+linux&ia=web

Regarding putting another drive into it, yes, again, you can mount it to see what is on it, (& save anything you want to external disk), before installing a new O/S onto it.

Thanks, I have done all that, but I cannot get access to the physical HDD. I only ever get booted into a virtual computer running in the memory, with no access that I can find to the physical HDD.

You should be able to mount the drive with a live mint. Does the output of lsblk show the internal drive?

There is no mention or showing of the HDD anywhere, as I said it only boots into a virtual computer running in memory.

I've tried Puppy Linux with the same result - it boots into a virtual computer running in memory.

Of course, but I cannot find the HDD anywhere.

Output of the lsblk command running a live Mint on a CentOS 7 system. If you can not see the hard drive with output of lsblk or dmesg then it is possible the drive has completely failed. In this case it is an ISO file on a virtualBox VM so it is a DVD disk versus a USB drive.

After some bother I have now found the HDD while running Linux Mint from the Live DVD, but trying to mount it gives this error message -

"Unable to mount 1000 GB Volume

Error mounting /dev/sda3 at /media/mint

93bbaf59-393a-40ef-82db-81b45577139c: can't read superblock on /dev/sda3"

I don't know what a superblock is.

What should I do now please?

Thanks.

The superblock is the filesystem metadata i.e. inodes etc.

What type of filesystem is /dev/sda3? Is it a physical volume for LVM. Is it encrypted?

1. Sorry don't know.

2. Sorry don't know that either. Don't know what LVM is, or what a physical volume is.

3. No, it is not encrypted.

I wonder if I should just run the "file repair" option in Disks.

The output of the following command will show filesystem types:
lsblk -f

It will also show if the partition is a physical volume for a LVM as I posted in #8

Without knowing the filesystem type I would reluctant to run fsck at the moment.

Thanks, I ran the command in the terminal and got -

Ok, just a regular partition. How did you try mounting it, Something like?

sudo mount -t ext4 /dev/sda3 /mnt

I see that there is also a "Boot Repair" option in the applications menu. Should I try that?

Thanks to everyone for all help.