Hello there,

Electricity at my house fell out because of short circuit and when I rebooted my linux box I had a kernel panic.

Is it possible to recover and save the data wich is stored on my harddrive?

If I reinstall linux without a disk format, will the data still be on the harddrive? (like when you reinstall windows) or is there no such thing?

Also, there are two HD's in the box, mounted as one. If I get them out and just connect them to another pc with an IDE cable as slaves, is that a way to recover the data?

I'm not much of a specialist with data recovery or kernel related things on linux.

I want to be sure about this before I do something wrong.

Thanks!

I'd get myself a live CD and boot that to start with, and see if you can mount the drives.

When you say they are mounted as one, do you mean raid (hardware or software), LVM, or something else?

I can't believe I made a typo in the title

I have no raid, I just know that I have two harddisks and on the box self it seems they are as one.

Strange, maybe I'm wrong.

Is there a way to fix a kernel panic, or is re-install the only solution?

thanks!

How important is the date on the disks?

Did you forget to answer the "get a live CD and see if you can mount the drives" part?

Hello Veyron,
Kernel panic is not a big issue. I have go through so many cases with my clients who have almost the same problem like you. So nothing to worry about it any more. You can recover the kernel panic issue by many methods which a trick. i will tell you few methods that will help to resolve the issue without a single loss of data.

Fist i suggest you Please check your ram if possible change the ram. Most of kernel panic issue is related to Memory and Ram. In second step if your RAM is ok and you still getting Carnal panic Error, do the simplest thing as you did with windows.
I mean reinstall the Linux with formatting. I have done this many time and pretty sure your data will be complete safe. Please make sure while installing don't format any partition.

I hope this will help you. If issue is still not resolved let me know.

Thank you

Hi,
You had a kernel panic.
Firstly it;s not that big a deal...

Try
a) (as already suggested) rebooting w/ a LiveCD (your distro probably comes with one) , run an fsck on your disk partitions (see them w/ cfdisk or equivalent), mount them, check all ok, umount, reboot via hdd
b) just reboot .. most likely, all will be fine.

2veyron: well, the liveCD is the best solution, really. You gotta mount then your hard drive, check /etc/fstab (on hard drive, you know) and look, if your /home directory is the mount point for separate section of HDD. I hope you store all your data in /home, don't you?
So then if /home is isolated of /etc, /usr and others - you can reinstall your system and format all partitions except of that one that's mounted to /home. So then you will be able to mount /home again and watch your data safe.

Hi, thanks for the responses!

Well, I burned the livedcd from centos, but I still got a kernel panic when trying to boot from it.
Then I downloaded one I've seen in another thread called "SystemRescueCD" and it booted without problems, mounted the drivers, it had samba standard on it and I downloaded all the files via network.

But while doing it I got allot of hardware failures and had to start over again, seems that my CPU was getting to hot because of the summer weather and I had to underclock it to work again without problems.

But eventually I got back all my data and I'm glad

I never worked with livecd's before or mounted a hd so thanks!

Well done!