First of all, make an image of the entire drive using ddrescue or just plain old dd and work on that image. That way, you won't make any mistakes you will regret later.
Excellent suggestion :-) One I hadn't thought of for some reason.
I have successfully used a tool called "autopsy" in the past, to recover files or even fragments of files out of a disk image. It's actually a tool for forensic analysis of drives, but it can work on damaged drives too (images thereof). I use it in combination with Sleuthkit, which provides a web interface to autopsy.
Both are Linux tools, and both are in the openSUSE repos (at least for 10.3).
There are some excellent suggestions here. A big thank you to everyone! I knew there had to be some Linux tools we could tinker with and try... now the problem is finding time to do a little surgery on this drive :-) I have a feeling it'll be about a week until we can spend some dedicated time on this. I'll report back any success or failures. C. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org