"can't find [HDD] in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab"

[stg]

Was fooling around with gparted and clonezilla

Now I can not mount one of my drives. The BIOS sees it fine. It passes all tests on the disk manufacturer's live diagnostic CD. If I ls /dev/sd* it shows up as /dev/sdb but when I try to mount it says "can't find /dev/sdb in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab"

??

[WorMzy]

Two things:
1) You can't mount a harddrive (except in rare cases, where the drive is basically just one big partition)

2) You need to specify a mount point if you're using the mount command

e.g.

sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt

Now, if you don't have any partitions (e.g. sdb1, sdb2, sdb5, etc) on the drive, you'll need to make one (unless your drive is one of the rare cases I mentioned above).

Hpefully this points you in the right direction and you can sort your self out from there, but if you're still struggling to understand why you can't mount it, post the output of:

sudo parted -l

here.

[stg]

Thanks!

here are the outputs of your suggestions

stg@gigtower:~$ sudo mount /dev/sdb /mnt
[sudo] password for stg:
mount: you must specify the filesystem type
stg@gigtower:~$ sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt
mount: special device /dev/sdb1 does not exist
stg@gigtower:~$ sudo parted -l
Model: ATA IBM-DTTA-350840 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 8455MB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos

Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
1 32.3kB 8044MB 8044MB primary ext3 boot
2 8044MB 8447MB 403MB extended
5 8044MB 8447MB 403MB logical linux-swap


Error: /dev/sdb: unrecognised disk label

stg@gigtower:~$

[WorMzy]

Error: /dev/sdb: unrecognised disk label

Hm. I've never gotten that error.

Does the disk show up in gparted at all? Can you take a screenshot of it if it does, and post it here?

[stg]

Yes it show's up, can't get the screenshot to work but I believe the operative information is

unallocated

invalid partition table - recursive partition on /dev/sda.

all I did was try to pull an image saved on it on to another drive with clonezilla, is there any way to restore this partition table??

[WorMzy]

On sda? Was that a typo?

If you have/had any important data on the drive, I recommend that you use something like testdisk to recover what you can. Otherwise, just create a new partition table on the disk (select sdb, then go to Device -> Create Partition Table).

After you've created a new partition table, make a partition. Ext4 is a good choice if you're only going to use the partition from Linux.

[stg]

solved

gpart -w

restore partition table