SuSE 9.3 - Retrieve data from bad drive - how to do?
 

We recently had our repository machine (SuSE 9.3) start misbehaving on us, throwing off a vast number of errors on boot. Additionally, we were less than properly diligent about checking the backups coming off of said machine (my fault, I should have kept aware of the situation and did not) costing us one of our repository directories. As a result, I'm trying desperately to come up with some way of getting the repository data off of the drive.

The machine never seems to boot up far enough for network connection, and during the boot attempt it's showing many errors invoking reiserfs. I'm unable to mount the cdrom; attempting it gave me a list of errors. (May not have been writable anyway; not sure.) I've tried plugging a jump drive into the usb port, but I cannot tell if it's being registered or not. I have managed to successfully mount the floppy drive and save some files that way, but the actual repository data is over 500 megs in size when packaged tar.gz, and split apparently only allows for 100 files.

We have another working box with the same hardware and an active SuSE 9.3 drive in it; I was hoping I could put the failing drive into that one as a secondary, but my own personal attempt at this ended at a grub prompt that I'm unsure how to proceed from. Beyond that, what information I have found on putting a secondary drive into the system seems to indicate that I'd have to completely reformat the drive in order to put it on...which kind of negates the point.

Does anyone have any more suggestions for what I might be able to do to retrieve our data from the bad drive, and if so would you please share them with me?

If you have a CD-Rom drive you should at first boot a live-CD, mount the partition(s) of your Suse and try to copy the date to an external drive.
You could in the BIOS disable the damaged drive from the boot-sequence.

Markus

Unless the drive itself has got HW problems booting may suggest running 'fsck' some more and invoking 'mount' may try to replay the journal. Since the OP already skewed disk contents by running fsck I would strongly suggest making a 'dd' copy of the disk or partition to a file on another physical disk before attempting anything else.