Are you facing problems in booting your Linux system? There may be a possibility that the hard disk of the Linux system has got full thereby disabling you from mounting the system. In such cases, you should use the Boot CD to enter the console and perform Linux recovery. If you are not able to fix the problem, then you should use a third-party Linux recovery software to perform Linux hard drive recovery.

Consider a scenario wherein you have installed Red Hat 9 in the root drive of your Linux system having ext3 file system. You did not realize about the size of the root drive. When you start the system next time, it failed to start up citing some corruption issues.

Cause:

The root drive has got full due to the installation, and it has become inaccessible. You need to remove some excessive files to be able to remount the Linux system.

Resolution:

To resolve this situation, you should perform the following steps:

  • Start the system with the Boot CD.
  • Choose the ‘rescue’ function during the installation procedure. It should land you in the console.
  • Mount your /root partition using the following commands:

console$ mkdir /mnt/root

console$mount -t ext3 /dev/hdax /mnt/root

  • Subsitute the ‘x’ in ‘/dev/hdax’ with correct value as suggested in the following commands:

/dev/hda1 for first partition

/dev/hda2 for second partition

/dev/hdb1 for first partition on second hard drive

  • Delete the unnecessary files by using the ‘rm’ command as shown in the following command:

console$ cd /path/to/the/directory/

console$ rm -r <directory or file>

  • Restart with ‘iinit 6′ or ‘reboot’. Now, you would be able to start the Linux system properly.

If the problem is persisting then you should format the Linux hard drive and reinstall the Linux operating system. However, that would mean that the valuable data will be lost. In such situations, you should use a third-party Linux recovery software to recover inaccessible data. Such Linux recovery tools are read-only in nature that do not overwrite the existing data while scanning the hard drive.

Stellar Phoenix Linux Data Recovery is a Linux hard drive recovery software that recovers lost, deleted, or formatted data from inaccessible Linux systems. It recovers data from ext2, ext3, ext4, FAT12, FAT16, and FAT32 file system based volumes. In addition, this Linux recovery utility supports various Linux distributions such as Red Hat, TurboLinux, Gentoo, SUSE, Slackware, Debian, Sorcerer, and Debian. If you want to use a Windows system to recover Linux hard drive, then you can surely do it as this Linux recovery software is compatible with Windows 7, Vista, Server 2003, XP, and 2000.