[NBLUG/talk] hard drive death, filesystem types

[Kyle Rankin]

On Thu, Dec 16, 2004 at 08:43:17PM -0800, Bob Blick wrote:
> On 16 Dec 2004 at 20:18, Lincoln Peters wrote:
> > > Any help for rescuing my reiserfs disk?
> > 
> > Did you try:
> > reiserfsck --rebuild-tree /dev/[your hard disk]
> 
> Basically reiserfsck quits when it gets an i/o error, so it won't 
> even test the disk completely, so there's no fixing it either.
> 
> I suppose I could copy the entire (225 gigabyte!) partition to 
> another hard disk, but I don't really know the best way to do that, 
> short of buying another maxtor drive, which I will never do. The 
> seagate drive I have is 200 gig. But any help would be appreciated, 
> since I am a newbie where it comes to using things like "dd" or any 
> other commands that might help me back up the drive. There seems to 
> be a massive amount of error on the drive.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Bob
>  

There's a nifty utility called dd_rescue (and its helper dd_rhelp) that
make it possible to copy even a partition with bad blocks and IO errors
onto another drive. After you do this, you would go back and attempt the
reiser recovery tools on the new partition and then attempt to recover
files.

Like Troy said, I cover step-by-step how to use dd_rescue with Knoppix in
my book, but I also blogged about it so you can read about it here:

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/5205

-- 
Kyle Rankin
NBLUG President
The North Bay Linux Users Group
http://nblug.org
IRC: greenfly at irc.freenode.net #nblug 
kyle at nblug.org