How can I mount a disk without formatting it?

Question

I have a disk filled with my precious data which was mounted in a machine. I want to mount this disk into another machine and read the data in it. It seems I have to set the disk partition and format the filesystem on it.

Can I mount the disk without formatting it? Isn't the information about the partitions and filesystem in the disk inside?

Answer 1

You are only able to mount partitions with known filesystems on it (Yes that information is on the disk). For getting info about supported filesystem-types, try

man mount 

If you want to give the automation a try, use (as root) :

mkdir /mnt
mount /dev/<your-partition> /mnt

and observe the output.

Probably you just forgot to specify the partition when you tried mounting ? so you should use :

mount /dev/sda1 /mountpoint

insteady of

mount /dev/sda /mountpoint

for finding out all partitions present on a disk, try

fdisk -l /dev/<device>