Hi all,

Under SUSE 9.2, I was downloading files to the bootable partition; At a point, the system hung. I shut the power down the hard way (manually), then when rebooting the system was stuck in a loop at the login screen: I log in and it brings me back to the same login screen. The 2nd reboot was clearly showing a warning concerning the stability of the system on the same login screen (with the same loop behavior).
The 3rd reboot was fatal: Grub didn't load correctly. Instead, it gives a minimal bash like command line with an error message: ERROR 18 about the partition size being bigger than what BIOS can handle. The problem was then clear; My partition was full and that corrupted it somehow.
Next, I booted from a knoppix live-cd which couldn't mount my partition saying it is not a valid ext2. I then ran mke2fs -n to get the backup superblocks and try to fix the problem with e2fsck -b and the backup superblocks that mke2fs listed. It didn't work!
At this point I'm starting to panic as I have quite valuable data on it and I didn't back them up.
Any tools that you could suggest?

Thanks in advance guys

I assume you have a partition big enough to install a new system. If you don't then time to get a bigger drive. There is a super tool for data recovery from;

http://www.sleuthkit.org/sleuthkit/

You will see in the documentation that there are also knoppix based forms of sleuthkit which may also be helpful.

This is a very good reason to have /home on a separate partition!

Thanks for the tips!
I tried a dozen of tools from a google search and as nothing worked I reinstalled the system. I guess it was too corrupted.
I'm waiting for a friends corrupted drive to test the super tool kit which seems very mature

I don't understand your systems behaviour. Look at this thread, you'll see that ext2 reserves about 5% space on each partition for just this situation. Did you change that? If so, feel the consequences now . Or did you surf as system adminstrator / root? If so, you don't deserve better .

Oh, btw. thanks for the link TigerOC