The story is: I`ve made one huge .tar file but there was not enough free sapce of my HDD. So I loged on GNOME to check how many space I have but the GNOME freezed. I restarted the system and after that I didn`t reseave log prompt but strange massage:

Keyboard: Time Out- AT keyboard not present (f4)

And my keyboard didn`t work anymore. So I`ve restarted a couple of times before to see the most scary
thing. When the my RedHat system starting and doing a lot of stuff like "cheking for new hardwere", "bring up eth0 interface" and .... , I saw

mounting local file system [failed]

I moved the hard drive to another Linux mashine but Linux didn`t find this hard drive. I`m thinking the HDD is gone The BIOS of the computer has found it but Linux not. I tryed to find it with hadwere browser from GNOME and even with the comand # kudzu, but nothing. I have very important data of this HDD. PLEASE somebody to help me!!! If there is a magic tool or.... I hope the drive is ok, only the file system is corupt and thats way I cannot find it. I don`t know. I need only my data back. 10x anyway!

So where is the drive installed?
/dev/hda - 1st IDE controller master
/dev/hdb - 1st IDE controller slave
/dev/hdc - 2nd IDE controller master
/dev/hdd - 2nd IDE controller slave

Do you know how the drive is partitioned? No? as root
fdisl -l /dev/hdx (that is a small L, /dev/hdx use device from above table)

Create a directory to use as a mount point
mkdir /mnt/disk

mount -t auto /dev/hdxy /mnt/disk

Replace x with the device from the table and y which is the partition ID listed from the fdisk command. If you know the filesystem type i.e. ext3, reiserfs etc. use that instead of auto.

When you put it in the other machine, does it physically detect it (check the output of "fdisk -l")? If so, then you should be able to mount it and delete as many files as you can to regain space.

I doubt there is a something physically wrong with the drive (though if you wrote something to bad sectors, it could have destroyed the drive, this has happened to me on occasions with older HDDs). Worst case scenario, you can wipe the drive and reformat it, but I don't think even that should be necessary.

To start, just try to mount the drive under another Linux system, and you can go from there.

If you can boot from CD, you might want to boot Knoppix and use it to poke around. At the very worst, you end up grabbing the data you need before trashing the drive.