mjhjmtu

I have an old Excito B3 running Debian. My problem is that the hardware died. I have a device so I can connect the internal hard drive via USB to my Ubuntu laptop. But when I try to access the /home of that drive it shows up as empty. My guess is that there is a problem with user rights.

Can anyone help me with how I can get access to these files?

/media/linkan/Bubba root/home$ ll

total 8
drwxrwxrwx 2 root root 4096 jan 1 2000 ./
drwxr-xr-x 24 root root 4096 okt 5 2012 ../

sudo parted --list

[sudo] password for linkan: 
Model: ATA INTEL SSDSC2BF18 (scsi) 
Disk /dev/sda: 180GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B
Partition Table: gpt

Number Start End Size File system Name Flags
 1 1049kB 8200MB 8199MB linux-swap(v1)
 2 8200MB 180GB 172GB ext4


Model: WDC WD30 EZRX-00MMMB0 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdb: 3001GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt

Number Start End Size File system Name Flags
 1 17,4kB 10,7GB 10,7GB ext3 root msftdata
 2 10,7GB 3000GB 2989GB home lvm
 3 3000GB 3001GB 1074MB linux-swap(v1) swap


Model: SD SC32G (sd/mmc)
Disk /dev/mmcblk0: 31,9GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos

Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
 1 4194kB 31,9GB 31,9GB primary fat32 lba

cat "/media/linkan/Bubba root/etc/fstab"

/dev/sda1 / ext3 noatime,defaults 0 1
/dev/mapper/bubba-storage /home ext3 defaults 0 2
/dev/sda3 none swap sw 0 0
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs defaults 0 0
/proc /proc proc defaults 0 0

sudo lvdisplay

 --- Logical volume ---
 LV Path /dev/bubba/storage
 LV Name storage
 VG Name bubba
 LV UUID M2Q0lX-y3gs-ZpP1-RwXY-QbQA-TZhP-6FltLF
 LV Write Access read/write
 LV Creation host, time , 
 LV Status NOT available
 LV Size 2,72 TiB
 Current LE 712580
 Segments 1
 Allocation inherit
 Read ahead sectors auto

The directory /media/linkan/Bubba root/home is empty because your old system had /home as a separate filesystem. So far, you've only mounted the root filesystem from the old disk.

Also, the old disk had the /home filesystem within a LVM logical volume, as indicated by this line in the old fstab file:

/dev/mapper/bubba-storage /home ext3 defaults 0 2

So, your old /home filesystem was within a LVM volume group named bubba, in a logical volume named storage. For historical reasons, there are two device paths for referring to such a logical volume: /dev/mapper/bubba-storage and /dev/bubba/storage. Both refer to the same thing.

When hot-plugging a disk that contains a LVM volume group, there is one extra step: you must activate the volume group before being able to mount any of the logical volumes within it. Run sudo vgchange -ay bubba to activate the volume group: if successful, the device /dev/mapper/bubba-storage should become available on your system. (If it fails, the error message from the vgchange command is going to be important in figuring out the problem.)

Then you can mount it anywhere you want, but perhaps it will be reasonable to mount it to its old mountpoint. First close any GUI file manager windows currently accessing the /media/linkan/Bubba root/home directory to avoid mount point is busy error messages, and do:

cd /
sudo mount /dev/mapper/bubba-storage "/media/linkan/Bubba root/home"

If you cannot access your old home directory under /media/linkan/Bubba root/home/ using your regular user account, it's probably because your account on the old system used a different UID number compared to your new system. This can be fixed easily. (I'm assuming that your current username is linkan and the username/home directory name on the old system was old_linkan. Change as appropriate.)

cd "/media/linkan/Bubba root/home"
sudo chown -R linkan: old_linkan

After the chown command completes, your old home directory should now appear as owned by you in ls -l listing, and it should be accessible as normal.