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I'm sorry if this question has been answered elsewhere, but I can't seem to find the right search terms to find an answer. I'm a casual linux user, so please treat me with green gloves.

I recently switched to a new desktop PC and installed Linux Mint 18 on its internal hard drive. I removed the internal hard drive from the old PC, placed it in an external USB enclosure, and plugged it into the new PC to move my user data over to my new hard drive. The system automatically mounted the GRUB partition, but nothing else. I thought it might be an issue with the enclosure, so I installed the drive in one of the internal drive bays inside the PC case, but I have the same problem.

I thought, "Why not reboot the machine, using the old drive as my boot drive, and transfer the files to the new drive that way?" But when I booted up from the old drive, I ended up with the same problem, but now with the new drive.

In both cases, when clicking on the partition on the Disks utility and selecting the gear menu, the mount options for the partition is grayed out.

Halp!

You should be able to read the HD that is in the external USB enclosure using the file manager in the linux desktop. You might have to make a new directory for it and mount the HD to that directory. You can use to find the listing/name of the old drive (/dev/??) and mount it to the new directory on your new computer. If the old HD has a GPT partition, you will have to use GParted (install using "apt update" and "apt install gparted", then from the GParted menu, "Devices" will show other drives to select or get the "name".

Are both OS installed encrypted? That is, do you normally get a message like "Please unlock disk sda5_crypt" when you boot?

One thing to consider here is your /etc/fstab file. That is pointing to the drive when it is installed in the computer, probably /dev/sda. So now you've plugged it into a usb port as an external drive but fstab is looking for / or /boot at most likely /dev/sda1 I don't know enough about UUID to know how it's supposed to work so someone with more knowledge of UUID will need to answer that. I actually don't use UUID I'm old school and use /dev/sdx in my fstab.

However you seem to be saying all you want to do is copy files over from the external?
To do that just boot up with a mint cd and mount the drives with caja(file manager) and copy over your user data.

edit: had to add a missing word for relevance.

donkeyroll wrote: ⤴Thu May 31, 2018 9:21 pm In both cases, when clicking on the partition on the Disks utility and selecting the gear menu, the mount options for the partition is grayed out.

You should be able to mount it from the regular file browser (called "Files" in the Mint Menu), by looking at the left side panel under Devices and clicking on it.

You say you are using the Disks Utility (not such a good idea because it can do dangerous things). But in that, instead of clicking the gear menu, you would click the very leftmost button that looks like a triangle/arrow (hover over it and it should say "Mount the Filesystem"). Then it will display a link for you to open the partition in the file browser. Just be careful not to click the - (minus) button next to the gears button!

You should be able to mount it from the regular file browser (called "Files" in the Mint Menu), by looking at the left side panel under Devices and clicking on it.

This is part of my trouble. The only drive that shows up under Devices is the grub partition. I'm really at a loss here.

donkeyroll wrote: ⤴Sun Jun 03, 2018 8:06 pm

You should be able to mount it from the regular file browser (called "Files" in the Mint Menu), by looking at the left side panel under Devices and clicking on it.

This is part of my trouble. The only drive that shows up under Devices is the grub partition. I'm really at a loss here.

Let me reiterate.

1. the settings in your /etc/fstab file are wrong.

2. Since those settings are wrong you need to boot up with a Mint CD instead of booting with your external drive.

3. Once you do that you will see your drives in the file manager and will be able to mount them. As long as the drives are still good and formatted with data on them this will work.

...and if it's an encrypted installation there's extra steps needed to unlock the LUKS and activate the LVM...
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