On 08/24/2008 10:57 AM, Chuck Payne wrote:
Guy,
My main partion, crash. I am getting I/O errors, which I know means the drive is dead. What I need is to get on that partition so I can get my config off or any thing that I can. I have ran reiserfsck --fix-fixable, I get these error, cannot read teh bock 5672. reiserfsck is tell me I can use a -B flag to fix it but when I try to use that flag, I get the help menu. Please some know what I can do to get my data.
I had a worse situation. I had /home and /usr/local on a 40GB drive and the root partition on a 120. I would backup my /home to the 120 every night. Then I installed SuSE 11.0 and I bought a new computer. before I had transferred my stuff to the new computer I was not able to boot the old computer. I found the 40GB drivce would not even spin up. The 120 was fine, but I found that I had forgotten to restart my nightly backup, so my /home backup was a month out of date, and there were some important emails I couldn't get to. Then, to my consternation, the nightly backup would not fully unbzip. The reason is that I had installed Virtual Box, and the VDI file was > 4G. In any case, I can't blame it on SuSE :-). I then put the 40G in a USB case, but it still would not spin up. I tried a few things including placing the drive in the freezer. I thought that was dumb, but some IT people I know have done this successfully. I finally sent it out to be recovered costing me a few cents. BTW: I do have a good backup from a year ago, but my checkbook is also one of the unrecoverable files and updating it from the last year is cumbersome, and makes it worth paying for the recovery. My suggestion to you is if you cannot physically retrieve the data, then you might be successful sending it to a data recovery company. There are a couple that charge under $300 if they recover, if not they'll send the drive back to you or send it to a clean-room capable company that can recover it. The problem with trying to repair the file system could possibly make things worse. In my research I did look at a lot of data recovery companies. Some will charge you a fee just to look at the drive. There is a firm in Cambridge, Ma that charges $595. If they can't recover the data you lose the $95. If they can, it could be well over $1000. In my case, my drive supposedly had a massive head crash, but I doubt it. I think the company I sent it to essentially works with screwed up filesystems, and send out damaged drives to real recovery companies. But, my data was 100% restored and is enroute back to me. -- Jerry Feldman <gaf@blu.org> Boston Linux and Unix user group http://www.blu.org PGP key id: 537C5846 PGP Key fingerprint: 3D1B 8377 A3C0 A5F2 ECBB CA3B 4607 4319 537C 5846