On 3 March 2015 at 10:10, Mark Rogers mark@more-solutions.co.uk wrote:
Thanks for the tip, I'll see whether that gets me in!
Sadly this got me nowhere so far, but I am not convinced this isn't the right track.
I've tried (and failed) to find a way to determine whether this is indeed a VMWare .dsk file. VirtualBox won't allow me to use it as is (unsupported file). I was able to use "vboxmanage convertfromraw" to "convert" to a vdi file, but the resulting file wasn't valid and I'm pretty sure that treating the .dsk as a raw file is no different from trying to mount it directly in Linux.
Some references I have found suggest that .dsk is indeed just a raw disk image (in which case I am no further forward!).
It is possible that the image is corrupt (eg it might have been taken from a damaged disk); if so I need to find ways to try to repair the filesystem as much as is possible (I need very little off the old disk). What steps would I take to try to locate an ext* filesystem and repair it? It's reasonable to assume that it would have been a fairly typical Linux installation as I didn't know enough back then to have done much else. I think I was using Red Hat back then and a quick grep of the image suggests it was RH7.