I went to dinner and came back to address this problem further. I ran across an article were an NTFS disk was recovered with ddrescue but the person could not mount it. I then ran across this article
Guide to Using DDRescue to Recover Data
I read this article from beginning to end looking for a clue as to what i might be doing wrong.
There is a section called "Working with image files containing multiple partitions"
After reading this section, I decided to follow the steps in this section to see what I would find out.
I moved into the recovery folder on disk1
cd /mnt/disk1/recovery/
Next I executed this command
parted disk2.img
The server responded with:
GNU Parted 3.3
Using /mnt/disk1/recovery/disk2.img
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted)
The next command in Parted was:
unit
Parted responded with:
Unit? [compact]?
The next command in Parted was:
B
Parted responded with:
(parted)
Next command to Parted is:
print
Parted responded with this information
Model: (file)
Disk /mnt/disk1/recovery/disk2.img: 3000592982016B
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags:
Number Start End Size File system Name Flags
1 32768B 3000592965119B 3000592932352B reiserfs
(parted)
at this pont i only see one partition but having read this article I remembered that this has an offset. See the start is at 32768. but my mount command did not have an offset. just a little further down the article was the command I hoped I was looking for:
mount -o loop,ro,offset=32768 /mnt/disk1/recovery/disk2.img /mnt/disks/drive2
Note with this mount command I am mounting it as ReadOnly (ro) and offering the start offset of 32768
After an agnizing minute as the drive1 spun up and started mounting the image I was greeted with the following in dmesg:
[32209.362880] REISERFS (device loop4): found reiserfs format "3.6" with standard journal
[32209.362890] REISERFS (device loop4): using ordered data mode
[32209.362890] reiserfs: using flush barriers
[32209.363866] REISERFS (device loop4): journal params: device loop4, size 8192, journal first block 18, max trans len 1024, max batch 900, max commit age 30, max trans age 30
[32209.363998] REISERFS (device loop4): checking transaction log (loop4)
[32209.397773] REISERFS (device loop4): Using r5 hash to sort names
I thought to myself, did it mount?
I went to /mnt/disks/drive2 and viola, I found my files.
Yea baby I am back in business!
A couple of things that made this attempt successful.
I set Parted to byte mode (not kilobyte) which gave me the precise location of the offset.
setting the image to read only (ro) protects the image from being written to. but the key to making this successful was the offset=32768. The mount command was able to locate the correct area to read and the mount completed successfully.
Thanks to @SpaceInvaderOne I was following his video on how to setup Krusader on my friends server. That video saved me a whole lot of headache. This server is being setup for a friend and I am doing a lot of things I did not do on my server. One of those was to setup short cuts in Krusader. Thses short cuts made it easy as pie to copy my files from my friends server over to my server. After the recovery is finished its time to renovate my server and make it better.