Boot up trouble

[oldfred]

If you mount in /mnt you have to drill down to / & back up to /mnt.

[Langstracht]

I went ahead "anyway".

mount needed a sudo but that's o.k.

And yes, according to Disks, the drive is now mounted.

Thinking "copy the files", I tried Files anyway. And it gave me no file access.

:Alas, here we go again:

sudo apt install testdisk

was unable to locate the package.

And, just to add to my frustration, Files reports "mnt" is empty.Even though Disks says it's "Mounted at /mnt".

I take if you mean to use either:

sudo e2fsck -C0 -p -f -v /dev/sdb1
# -y auto answers yes for fixes needing response, also see man e2fsck

or

sudo e2fsck -f -y -v /dev/sdb1

Yes? Or perhaps both? In that order?

[VMC]

Grub can read ISO images from harddisk, and boot them. Thus no need for USB stick or whatever to install or start a Linux distro for debugging. You can save the ISO image of any of such Linux distro into a partition Grub can read and add an entry for this ISO. An example Grub menu entry you can add into your /boot/grub/grub.cfg:

menuentry "Some Ubuntu ISO" {
        set isofile="/<directory>/Ubuntu.iso"
        loopback loop (hd0,5)$isofile
        linux (loop)/casper/vmlinuz.efi boot=casper iso-scan/filename=$isofile noprompt noeject
        initrd (loop)/casper/initrd
}

The menu entry above assumes that your ISO is located in /dev/sda5 ( hd0,5 ). You can change this according to your wishes.

The example is from here.

With loopback loop command above, you can even look inside of an ISO interactively in Grub interactive prompt.

This doesn't work with Secure Boot. See this.

[oldfred]

My original post was an example that used sdb1 and said to use all your ext4 partitions.
Your partition that seems like it should be ext4 was sda6, so you have to run fsck on sda6.

Most suggest a general fsck command, but if it starts asking for y or yes and you have many files pressing y can be a pain. The two commands are one that will not ask for y and another that then automatically says yes.

[Langstracht]

To pencuse.

Sorry but I am just a bit confused. This thread started with me complaining that booting up always, and only, had me receiving a "GRUB RESCUE" response. So I don't believe I can "Grub" anything.

As for the ISO file, I don't believe I have an ISO on the problem HD. And I have to wonder why you think I do.

What I do have is about 250,000 files on the drive that Disk Usage and Properties tell me about with, as yet, no way to access them.

To oldfred

Thanks for the feedback. You didn't seem to choose between the two commands. And I'm not able to. So I'll give the first one a whirl and see what gives.

Not sure what it might give me but I'll report whatever I can find.

[oldfred]

These are two different fsck command as they use different parameters over the generic fsck.
See
man fsck

Then you may need repairs:
sudo e2fsck -C0 -p -f -v /dev/sda6
# -y auto answers yes for fixes needing response, also see man e2fsck
sudo e2fsck -f -y -v /dev/sda6

[Langstracht]

Well so much for that.

I've run both commands - both with the same result:

"/dev/sda6 is mounted.
e2fsck: Cannot continue, aborting."

Alas, so, the beat goes on ...

[oldfred]

You have to unmount sda6 to run fsck.

[Langstracht]

I suppose you would have expected me to have more trouble. And, unfortunately, you'd have been right!

Attempt to unmount results in:

"Command 'unmount' not found, did you mean:

command 'unmount' from deb mount

Try: sudo apy install <deb name>

I'd be happy to, if I knew what "<deb name>" was ...

[Langstracht]

Remedial typing needed too.

sudo apt install, NOT sudo apy install