On Tue, Dec 9, 2008 at 4:15 PM, Alex Schuster <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Paul Hartman writes: > >> I accidentally sent this from the wrong email address the first time, >> not sure if it went through to the list so I'm sending it again (I >> apologize if it is a duplicate). > > I don't think so. > >> If anyone has any ideas at all about how to go about fixing/mounting >> this, I will be forever in your debt. Thanks. > > Before doing anything further with it, you should create an image of your > dying drive and analyze that instead. And create a 2nd image, in case you > mess up the first one while repairing it, and the drive really died in > the meantime. > dd if=/dev/sdf of=/mnt/sdf.img > unplug drive > cp /mnt/sdf.img /mnt/sdf.img2 > OR > gzip -c /mnt/sdf.img > /mnt/sdf.img.gz > > You can then try photorec from app-admin/testdisk, but reiserfs is not > really supported. But this looks promising: > http://antrix.net/journal/techtalk/reiserfs_data_recovery_howto.comments
Hi, Thanks, to both who suggested making a dd image of the disk before doing anything else. That is definitely a smart path and I will do that, as soon as I buy another hard drive large enough. (It is a 320gb drive and i only have spare 120gb drive and around same free space on my windows vista box, and only a few gigs free on my linux box). TigerDirect has a 1tb drive for $79.99 USD after rebate, so that seems like a good deal. I will use it for recovery (hopefully) and then format and give it as an xmas gift. :) it is XFS not Reiser, and XFS is not even mentioned by the PhotoRec site but it's worth a shot. If it doesn't include filenames it may be almost worse than losing it (then I'll have to categorize and name them all ... ugh :P) The good news is that I defragmented the files on it just days ago, so at least they should be contiguous. however the vast majority of the space is video which will reduce the likelihood of it being contiguous if it's a 1gig+ file size. As to why I had XFS on an external drive... there is no reason. It was an empty drive and I was using it to experiment with different FS and it happened to be formatted as XFS when I decided to use it for "temporary" storage. Until recently it was full of MAME roms and TV shows and things like that which would be easily replaced :P of course it waited until it had personal files before breaking... it's a law of hard drives. On Google I saw about this Windows program called UFS Explorer that claims to be able to recover from XFS; from the description on the site it sounds too good to be true (recover anything from anywhere, basically)... I have not found any info about it other than the site http://www.ufsexplorer.com/ Years ago when I had a similar problem in a JFS drive I found some shareware JFS recover that scanned the whole disk and recovered absolutely everything that was not on a bad sector... it was the best $15 ever spent. In fact I purchased it twice just because I was so happy. :) Paul
