Sorry if this is covered elsewhere, I'm really hoping to get this right first time rather than lose backup information.
I installed Ubuntu 14.04 Final Beta a few days back - during the install, there was a problem installing the MBR to my target drive (/dev/sdb - Samsung 128Gb SSD). The only way around it that I found was following a tutorial that had me boot into the Live USB, install an application that did a guided repair of the MRB - it looks to have installed that on my backup drive (/dev/sda - WD 350Gb HD).
I've installed the 14.04 Release today on /dev/sdb, but to boot it, I need to boot /dev/sda which has the MBR (ie. /dev/sda needs to be first in the BIOS boot order). This "works", but I don't have access to the /dev/sda harddrive to access important backup data.
What I'm guessing I need to do is get the MBR on to /dev/sdb so that it boots independently, then find a way to mount and access /dev/sda - but I'm not sure if the correct method, and I can't afford to lose what's on /dev/sda.
Any help here would be deeply appreciated - I'm reasonably comfortable with basic terminal commands (update, install, remove, navigating directories etc.)
Edit: Here's the output of cat /proc/partitions
:
mitch@mitch:~$ cat /proc/partitions
major minor #blocks name
8 0 312571224 sda
8 1 312570168 sda1
8 16 125034840 sdb
8 17 116689920 sdb1
8 18 1 sdb2
8 21 8342528 sdb5
11 0 1048575 sr0
Edit: When using the 'sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/wdhdd' command, I get 'mount: you must specify the filesystem type'.
Thanks heaps,
Mitchell
Edit 2: Output of 'parted -l':
Model: ATA WDC WD3200BEVT-7 (scsi) Disk /dev/sda: 320GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: msdos
Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 1 32.3kB 320GB 320GB primary boot
Model: ATA SAMSUNG SSD 830 (scsi) Disk /dev/sdb: 128GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: msdos
Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 1 1049kB 119GB 119GB primary ext4 2 119GB 128GB 8543MB extended 5 119GB 128GB 8543MB logical linux-swap(v1)