data recovery

[dep]

quoth Javier Govea:

| The linux recovery mode upon starting first told me that i don't have
| any partitions. But once i'm in the recovery mode i can list my
| partitions with fdisk -l. I can mount /dev/hda1 (my boot partition)
| using mount but it is mounted as ext2 (it should be ext3) I have
| access to almost all information in hda1 as an ext2 partition.

ext3 is simply ext2 with a journal, so this is really not of tremendous 
concern, presuming you can get at the data there you want (/etc comes 
to mind, if it's there).

| But the information i really want is in /dev/hda2. I cannot mount
| hda2, not even as ext2. If i try to mount hda2 as ext3 dmesg shows me
| this:
|
| hda: read_intr: status=0x59 { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest
| Error } hda: read_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError },
| LBAsect=261192, sector=4152 end_request: I/O error, dev 03:02 (hda),
| sector 4152
| JBD: IO error reading journal superblock
| EXT3-fs: error loading journal.

okay. for now forget entirely about ext3. just try to mount it as plain 
old ext2. 

| So, I think I have some damaged blocks. Is there any tool that I can
| use to recover my information? or to fix the damaged blocks? will
| e2fsck -c recover/fix something? i'm not very familiar with e2fsck, i
| don't want to run it until i'm completely sure i won't screw up my
| hard disk even more.

well, you're not likely to break it more than it being unreadable, which 
is what you have right now. on an *unmounted* drive, type 

e2fsck /dev/hda2 and run it. if it asks you if you want to fix whatever 
it thinks is broken, say yes. expect a.) to spend some time saying yes 
anf b.) to lose some data. you might be surprised -- there could be no 
loss. but don't count on it.

when it's all done, you should be able to mount the partition and do, 
then, as you please.
-- 
dep

Nuclear bazookas are wholly ineffective against space monsters.