Thanks for all that. The local drive isn't big enough to do a backup - but I've ordered another drive for Monday, so will do a backup to that once I have it connected.
As for the file explorer showing the old mount, perhaps that's the case, though I think what I meant to ask was whether this...
I had similar results with each mount command.
Here's the response to the latter: Unable to mount usb-ASMT_2105_00000000000000000000-0:0-part1
mount: according to mtab, /dev/sdb1 is mounted on /drive
mount failed
Looking in the home/desktop folder, and clicking on the icon there produces the...
Thanks, Rob, glad to be here!
Initially, I'm letting the OS try to connect. When that doesn't work I'm doing things like using the Preferences|Disks utility, or going into a terminal and trying things like mnt.
I don't know enough about stab to try anything there.
fsck did find lots of...
Thanks, that might have a bit of new info. Mostly it describes things I've already done. It does make we wonder whether I can convert ext3 to ext2 and access the data that way. Is that the best approach? Is there more troubleshooting I can do to identify the fault?
I've got a disc drive mounted in a caddy that uses linux to communicate with the (home, Windows) network. The drive has been failing to mount, usually returning a message like "wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error".
The drive...