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I'm running an Ubuntu server on an old Dell Poweredge 800. After updating it, I'll get several 'System program problem detected' popups on startup. Several seconds later the keyboard and mouse will freeze up then the screen will go blank. I've tried recovering my data using the method outlined here but the main drive doesn't appear under the list of drives. I've gone into recovery mode and verified that the files still exist.

Is there some alternative way to access that drive and if not, what is the next easiest way to recover the data from my drive?

EDIT:

lsblk output:

NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda      8:0    0 153.4G  0 disk 
├─sda1   8:1    0   243M  0 part /media/f9b18a81-df67-4629-8ba4-e57698667825
├─sda2   8:2    0     1K  0 part 
└─sda5   8:5    0 153.1G  0 part 
sdb      8:16   0  74.5G  0 disk 
├─sdb1   8:17   0 133.3M  0 part 
└─sdb2   8:18   0  74.4G  0 part /media/Data disk
sdc      8:32   0 931.5G  0 disk 
├─sdc1   8:33   0   1.6G  0 part 
└─sdc2   8:34   0 929.9G  0 part /media/Data disk_
sr0     11:0    1 693.3M  0 rom  /cdrom
loop0    7:0    0   663M  1 loop /rofs
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  • What is the file system format you used on your server?
    – Byte Commander
    Jan 24, 2015 at 3:53
  • Can you post the output that the "lsblk" command gives you when you execute it, just to check if the drive is detected but not listed due to an unknown nautilus bug or something. Just in case. Jan 24, 2015 at 3:59

2 Answers 2

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It looks to me like almost all the big drives are already mounted, from the lsblk listing. The linked answer says to look under "drives" in Nautilus, but if it's not working then just browsing to the mount points (folders) should work.

  • sda1 is on /media/f9b18a81-df67-4629-8ba4-e57698667825
  • sdb2 is on /media/Data disk
  • sdc2 is on /media/Data disk_

Only /dev/sda5 might still need a sudo mkdir /media/sda5mount && sudo mount /dev/sda5 /media/sda5mount

Then just browse to the /media/..... folders and take a look around.

If you can see the files there, and especially if everything still looks good in recovery mode, then I don't think the filesystems or partition tables need fixing.

So booting from a live DVD/USB, or even booting to recovery mode, you should be able to copy the files to a USB device or DVD (command line tools for that might be a little daunting in recovery mode), or copy to another network device, etc.

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  • All of my information should be in SDA1 but when looking into it from a live booted CD I only see a handful of files. Here's a screen shot: i605.photobucket.com/albums/tt137/ninjafrog666/… Jan 25, 2015 at 1:35
  • A plain ls won't list hidden files, an ls -la could show more, I don't think running sudo ls -la will matter, but couldn't hurt. But, sda1 is only 243MB, and it looks like it's only a boot partition, maybe that's all it has. sda5 is 153GB, there's probably more files there.
    – Xen2050
    Jan 25, 2015 at 3:59
  • Yes, I've verified that there are no hidden files. You're probably right about it being sda5, since that is the size of the drive I was primarily using. However, sda5 isn't mounted, so how do I go about doing so? Jan 25, 2015 at 5:30
  • There's terminal mkdir and mount commands in my answer, under the bullet points. Or using a utility like "Disks" could work, and sometimes Nautilus or other file managers list disk drives/partitions to click & mount, but as your original Q that might not always show up.
    – Xen2050
    Jan 25, 2015 at 6:20
  • Thanks, that worked. It turns out that my problem stemmed from the partition being LVM. I managed to mount it by installing lvm2 and running 'modprobe dm-mod && vgchange -ay' Jan 26, 2015 at 2:11
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If you're not reading the drives, it might be a partition table problem. I would recommend running a live CD on USB (or CD if you roll that way). And then running testdisk.

From testdisk, you can repair your partition table, recover files, and even recover some deleted files which haven't been overwritten a lot.

Some links:

EDIT: Actually your lsblk suggests your partition is detected properly at /dev/sda1 for the server's root directory I'm guessing. Is the data you want to recover in /dev/sda or /dev/sdb or /dev/sdc? Either way, testdisk should still work for repairing partition tables and recovering data.

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