How can I mount WD Worldbook drives in Linux?

April 30, 2008 5:00 PM

I have two hard drives out of a Western Digital Worldbook (WD10000D033) that both show up as a Linux RAID partition in cfdisk. How can I mount these drives to pull the data off?
posted by jackofsaxons to computers & internet (4 comments total)

Were they RAID 1 or RAID 0?
posted by SirStan at 6:11 PM on April 30, 2008

If the RAID was mirrored, you should be able to mount the drive as you would any Linux drive. Make sure you mount it read-only, though, if you don't want to corrupt the RAID.

If it was striped.. dunno. Maybe mdadm can do it.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 6:14 PM on April 30, 2008

First question is, wha' happened that you need to do this?

Second question is, what was the original capacity of the device versus the individual capacity of the drives? If it was 1TB with two 500GB drives, then they were a striped set (RAID 0). This link suggests it is. Can't find anything useful on the wdc.com site.

Assuming they are RAID 0, you should probably do the following: (check my work, this is untested and just a guess)

assuming the two drives are on the system as /dev/sdX and /dev/sdY, run

mdadm -Q /dev/sdX /dev/sdY

That'll (should) tell you what their positions were in the old array and what the name of the array should be. (it'll probably be /dev/md0)

then run

mdadm --assemble --readonly /dev/md0 /dev/sdX /dev/sdY

(assuming the drives were in the correct positions- the drive that identified as 0 of 1 should be first.)

at that point, it should have the raid device started, and then you can mount it (also readonly) wherever you want

mount -o ro /dev/md0 /directorywhereyouwantitmounted

(probably have to do this as superuser/root.)

cd into the directory and see what you see.
posted by gjc at 7:47 PM on April 30, 2008

Before you run the mount command above, you might want to do:

file -s /dev/md0

to see what kind of filesystem it had on it. Also

fsck -n /dev/md0

to see if there is filesystem corruption.
posted by 5MeoCMP at 10:41 PM on April 30, 2008