Hi,
I'm usually happy experimenting and finding things out but this one is taking a very long time and time is getting very critical (certain documents I need to recover in order to apply for a student visa are on a "corrupt" disk) so I would appreciate any help.

I think I have the data corruption on the Ubuntu 2.6.28-11 kernel issue:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...1?comments=all

Once my main drive became inoperable, I installed Jaunty on a spare hard disk and as soon as I installed it, I downgraded the kernel using this as a guide:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php...8&postcount=29
no problems so far.


But I need to recover the data from my corrupted hard disk. It's all ext4 based.

When I attach it as a secondary SATA drive (sdb) and boot from my working drive and attempt to go into rescue mode via grub, it takes forever because the system spits out the errors on the corrupted drive.
After about an hour of spitting out errors, I finally get to a root shell in the hopes that I can fsck.
Thereafter, typing "sudo fdisk -l" does not show the corrupted disk even though I get errors like "Buffer I/O error for sdb....."

Any idea how I can at least fsck the corrupt drive?


Thanks.

Hello koobi

It would be prudent, before any further attempts to get data from the damaged file system, to backup what you have got and ensure you don't lose any more. Then you can try all the experiments you want on the copy of the damaged file system.

The dd command is good for imaging partitions.

What sort of files are these documents? An informative answer to that question would be the output from Best

Charles

Thanks for the reply.

That's the thing, I can't even see the damaged disk in order to mount it (it's an entire separate hard disk) in order to backup anything.

Even to use dd, you need to at least see the disk in order to know it's location right? I know it should be /dev/sdb but the following yields no results:
I'm also not sure how to use dd.
For now, I have disconnected the corrupt hard disk. I really need those documents before Thursday. Bad timing eh? I just finished creating the documents and the next day morning, this happens.

...just maybe you can get lucky with what I did recently...
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...00#post3614800

Not believing it would work I nevertheless tried using SpinRite
http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm
I just booted up with it - did not use any of its features - just booted up with it
...and my drive was detected and working again.

I thus was able to make a backup.
Only after that I really used Spinrite on that disk - the disk was working flawlessly again and I lost none of my data.
Nevertheless I replaced the drive...