So I've been using Fedora 8 for a couple months now and been pretty pleased with it. I went to boot up yesterday and during the boot sequence right after it says "Starting udev [OK]" the screen goes black. I can hear the hard drive clicking around a bit, but after a while it stops and the screen is still black. I went into recovery mode and was able to see my drive and data after typing "chroot /dev/sysimage", but I couldn't mount my external hard drive or my flash drive to move the data. I kept getting an error that said "FATAL: Error inserting fuse: Required key not available. So I guess in the end my goal is to get back up and running with my data intact. Whats the best way to do that?

thanks,
Jason

A clicking hard drive is usually an indication of a failing drive. I would boot with a LiveCD and copy any important data to an external drive.

Then I would run some drive diagnostics on the failing drive and see just how bad it is. The Ultimate Boot CD had lots of hard disk tools on it that can tell you how bad it is failing. If it isn't actually failing and it was just a filesystem error, you can try fixing it with fsck and/or testdisk.

Smartctl is good tool for hard disk diagnostics. See a good intro article on http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/monito...g-systems.html

I agree with the other comment that it is time to backup as soon as possible. As soon as the disk fails entirely it will become expensive to retrieve data, and even money won't buy you the guarantee that it can be retrieved. Reminds me of an painful experience that I had in the past ...

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Thanks for the responses guys. So I took your advice and booted off a live cd, but the system doesn't automatically mount the partition I'm trying to recover. It sees my windows partition and my external USB hard drive, and if I fdisk ls it shows the drive I want to get at. However, if I try to mount it, it tells me the drive is already mounted or the directory I'm mounting to is busy. If I try to fsck it also says the drive is busy. If I try to unmount the drive, it says it isn't mounted. Any tools for seeing what is using the drive, or any other advice?

You can try using lsof to see what process is using a particular resource.