Listmates, Uugh! I have a disk that is cratering and I need to get the data off it, if possible. (I just don't want to have to re-download all the suff -- mostly 11.0 rpms, but it is several Gig). The problem occurred last night during update of my 11.0 install on my laptop. I guess that the read/write head finally hit a bad spot in the disk and, for lack of better words, the disk went 'offline'. Meaning, kde was still running fine, but I was unable to access anything on the disk. I had to power-off to shutdown. (halt, reboot, shutdown commands could not be found...) I have swapped disks to my spare and I can access the failing disk over usb, but only for a minute or two. After I have mounted the partitions, if I start copying files, it will copy a few and then die. fskc starts, but then dies: 13:50 alchemy:~> fsck.ext3 -p /dev/sdb6 /dev/sdb6: recovering journal fsck.ext3: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while trying to re-open /dev/sdb6 e2fsck: io manager magic bad! 13:51 alchemy:~> fsck.ext3 -p /dev/sdb6 fsck.ext3: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while trying to open /dev/sdb6 Could this be a zero-length partition? Unplugging/replugging the disk, I can get the disk info with fdisk, but I don't know how to repair the reported problem. Here is the partition information from fdisk: Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 1 192 1536000 27 Unknown Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary. /dev/sdb2 192 10635 83886080 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sdb3 * 10636 38913 227143035 f W95 Ext'd (LBA) /dev/sdb5 10636 10897 2104483+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/sdb6 10898 13508 20972826 83 Linux /dev/sdb7 13509 38913 204065631 83 Linux Command (m for help): v Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary. 12403 unallocated 512-byte sectors The drive has visa on sdb2, some recovery stuff on sdb1, swap is sdb5, with / and /home as sdb6 and sdb7. I believe all the files are still there and are doing fine, but the partition table seems to be mucked up. What tools are available and how can I try to repair the partitions?? Any -- I mean Any -- help will be appreciated. Let me know if I can provide more info. Thanks. p.s. -- really hoping this isn't a rescue and dd if=/dev/sdbX of=BigDisk problem.... -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E. Rankin Law Firm, PLLC 510 Ochiltree Street Nacogdoches, Texas 75961 Telephone: (936) 715-9333 Facsimile: (936) 715-9339 www.rankinlawfirm.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org