On Thu, 2007-05-17 at 17:04 +0100, Mick wrote: > On Thursday 17 May 2007 16:38, Mick wrote: > > On Thursday 17 May 2007 15:45, Dan Farrell wrote: > > > On Thu, 17 May 2007 12:36:25 +0100 > > > > > > Mick wrote: > > > > I tried to dd the boot sector so that I can look at it on my hard > > > > drive, but it cannot access /dev/sda. Is there anything that I can > > > > do with my Gentoo to recover the files on this USB? > > > > > > have you tried reading raw from the device like > > > > > > | dd if=/dev/sda of=sda.image > > > > > > ? That might do the recovery. How to get it out of the image is the > > > same problem but once the backup succeeds you can plug it into a > > > windows xp box and reformat, and you will probably end up with the same > > > partition structure as originally. Then you can try to read the right > > > part of the image out of the image, once you get the numbers from fdisk > > > on the newly formatted drive, and end up with an image of sda1. From > > > there you should be able to mount sda1 and read out the data, if it > > > isn't corrupted. > > > > Thanks Dan, as I said above I tried to extract the MBR out of it by > > running: > > > > dd if=/dev/sda of=/tmp/r1 bs=512 > > > > But couldn't access it whatsoever. > > > > Oops! I could access it, but of course I had to try it as root! Right, I've > got it on my hard drive now, but still cannot mount it: > ================================== > # mount -t vfat /dev/loop2 /tmp/r1 > mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/loop2, > missing codepage or other error > In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try > dmesg | tail or so > ================================== Have you tried mounting with just mount -o loop /dev/loop2 /tmp/r1