starting to panic, hope i can get my data back
 

i'm not sure what to do. i wrote a thread about my gnome (and kde) login options disappearing. i couldnt login with gnome, so i was going to try to format and mount an additional hard disk, copy my data over, and start over with a new fedora install. it may sound like a lot of work for nothing, but i dont know much yet, and the gracious responses i got in the other thread did not help. i booted to a bootcd, formatted the new drive with ext3, and rebooted. i'm not sure how it affected my main drive (the one with all the data i need), but now when i attempt to boot my machine (without the additional drive), it hangs on grub stage 2. i tried to use a method of repairing grub with the FC4 rescue dvd, but it does not work. what is the default mount point of a hard drive in FC4? it's an SATA drive. is it /dev/sda? i tried to access a few different possible mount points with fdisk, but i could not successfully read anything.

my question is, how can i get my data back? no comments about backups right now. should i install FC4 to the other drive, and mount the drive i want to get stuff from as a secondary drive when i get it all running? after using FC4 for the entire summer, i'm using a windows machine as a "backup". feels pretty pathetic. any help you can give is very much appreciated.

CJ

when booting with a bootcd now, none of the disk partition tools can find the disk. i'm fucked, right?

How is the machine's hardware setup now? A sata disk shall appear as a /dev/sda, indeed.
I'd try a livecd in order to get my data back from the drive, in the first place. Which one did you try? Did you make sure it supports a sata disk? Last time I checked for sata support, it wasn't avaliable in every livecd... But I managed to mount a sata disk under kanotix livecd and the debian netinstall of sarge version. Maybe the latest version of knoppix can help you.
Is the addidtional drive a sata disk, as well?

i'm not using a livecd, i used a bootcd, with all sorts of tools on them, it was hiren's bootcd i believe. i have an ubuntu livecd that i'll try as well. the additional hard drive is an ide drive. i'm not sure what i could have possibly done to get this drive to be unrecognized by any partition or fdisk-type tools. this does not look good.

if you didn't explicitly edit the partitions of format the drive, all stuff shall be there. I can't believe the fedora installer or any other modern linux install cd would do something serious to a drive without a lot of warnings to the user, before.

unless we're talking about hw failure...
Do the drives appear in the bios and POST screen?

i've booted into the ubuntu livecd, where should i look for the data? or where should i look to see if the drive has been mounted at all?

in the bios, there is an option for IDE, but no SATA. the post screen goes by so fast, i can barely see it.

Try hitting the 'pause break' key to see the post. In my board, there's another screen just for the sata controller which lists the devices. They don't actually appear together with the ide's.

I never used the ubuntu cd, but try to open a console, become root, and mount using the same command lines as before.

ok this is where it gets strange. i physically removed the hard drive from the case, and i'm using the older style power connectors (too stressed to think of the name) instead of the sata style connectors. i can boot fedora normally (except i still have no gnome/kde options still), i can login to the blackbox terminal, and my data is still there. so i'm relieved to be able to browse the filesystem and see that my stuff is there. i heard the drive spin up, so i knew (thought?) it wasnt a power issue. at this point, i'm glad to see the data.

what now, install FC4 on the blank ide drive, then add the drive with the data on it as a secondary drive? i'm not sure how to do that quite yet. if i install fedora (or any distro, but fedora is the one i'll be using) on my ide drive, and i have my sata drive connected at the same time, would the isntaller detect it, and automount it? or would it be a good idea to leave it disconnected during the install process? i wouldnt want the installer to accidentally overwrite anything. believe me, i'm not going to take the chance with anything here. i'm not sure how to add a second drive to an already established install, so i'm not sure about letting the installer autodetect things, if it can even do that. thanks for the replies so far. i was quite worried for a little while.

CJ

CJ, if I were to do that, I'd backup data from the sata disk to a cd-r or so, and I'd try to install fedora to the sata disk, without taking any chances. Because this way you can benefit from the higher speed of sata disks, your system will run more comfortably. Then you can use the ide as an extra room, or backup.
But, surely, if you prefer to install on the ide, its up to you. To add the sata disk after this is quite easy. You can also leave the drive connected during install. I have no experience with fedora, but I doubt it won't detect the drive. Also, fedora shall do no harm to it, unless explicitly letting you know.
What is the current partitioning scheme of the sata disk? Is it very big, that you can't backup it up quickly with a cdr drive?

yes, there is quite a lot of data, all ready to burn to dvds, it's a large video project i'm working on, all i was waiting for was the dvds to arrive. my plan was, install to the ide drive with the sata drive connected, copy/backup, then format/install on sata drive, then use ide as backup as you said. i think it may be my only option, because of the size of the data on the drive. plus, i can't find a cd/dvd writing tool that i can use from the console. it's strange, the console will launch certain graphical programs (firefox, thunderbird, gaim), but cannot find programs such as k3b (disc burning). if i could find a dvd burning program, i'd have backed up my data before i tried installing my ide drive. anyway, thanks a lot for the help.

CJ

Search for growisofs and cdrecord. Two mainstream cd recording command line options. They have lots of options for recording, but you can also find some scripts to automate the task.
I have a very nice backup script using growisofs. It will record a dvd like this:

growisofs -dvd-compat -joliet-long -Z /dev/hdd -J -R /home/bruno/

from my /home dir.



Good luck!