How to copy ext2fs from failed hard drive to good drive?
 

I have a Maxtor DiamondPlus 9 80GB hard drive that has failed. The partion table is corrupt and cannot be written. I can read the drive, however, and have successfully transferred all MS-Windows partitions to a new drive. Using R-Linux, I can recover individual files it finds and can, probably, capture the entire ext2fs partition to a MS-Windows partition on the new drive. What I would like to do is copy the ext2fs partition on the failed drive to an ext2fs partition on the new drive. What tool can I use to make the copy? When copied successfully, I hope to boot the copied partition and use fsck to fix the damaged inodes. Thanks for any help.

just install the drive in your system, mount the drive then copy the files

Not sure I completely understand the situation. You can 'capture/restore' partitions in linux using the 'dd' command (e.g. dd -if=/dev/hda1 -of=somebigfile). There are options for setting block size and block count which are probably signficant in this case. There is even a command to resize a restored partition to fill the new partition (Sorry - I don't have this on the PC I'm using -- resizextfs or something???).

If you have already captured the partition with a low-level copy to <somebigfile> you may be able to mount it directly using the loopback device (if this is enabled in your kernel) with something like

mount -o loop <somebigfile> /mnt

But maybe you will want to make a copy before doing fsck or whatever. Sorry if I misunderstood the problem.