Need advice recovering from hard disk error
 

I have a mythtv FC7 system that apparently just lost some hard disk sectors, so now some critical O/S files are gone. The box will not fully boot up since the file system cannot be started. I have 2 physical hard drives, sda (150GB) and sdb (300GB), where sda has the O/S and some data, and sdb has more data. The errors are on sda, it seems.

Anyway, when I switch to single user mode and try to run fsck, I get a library loader error. Looks like the bad sector has clobbered the related O/S files, at the least.

Needless to say, I do not have a backup of so much data. But, I would like to salvage what I can, so getting this thing to boot up is imperative. Thoughts? Should I try to boot from the install DVD? Or a rescue DVD?

Advice very much appreciated.

Larry

Hi, I wonder if this post might be on subject...
http://forums.atomicmpc.com.au/index...t=0#entry59876

If not and you want to recover the data from the 150Gb drive, you can use

testdisk (PhotoRec) http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

or dd_rhelp and dd_rescue http://vaab.free.fr/utilities/dd_rhelp/index.en.html

you'll need a partition of equal size at least and plenty of time. It really does work, I've used both to recover scratched cdroms (2) and to recover a small partition.

Cheers, Glenn

ps, I recommend slax on a flash drive if you need a spare Operating System.
http://www.slax.org/