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Well just when I thought things couldn't get worse after my harddrive crashed I setup the one that crashed to be my backup harddrive so I would not need to worry (I thought it just didn't like the boot partition). The next day I booted it back up and it didn't get past "Booting from CD" I thought it was odd so I tried fixing it but could not because I was thinking it was GRUB being bad, turns out it was my BIOS set to the wrong drive but I didn't know that at the time (how it got switched I don't know). Anyways I decided I might as well try SUSE 10.0 so I put that on my main drive thinking everything was backed up on the other. Well when I went to copy over some files from my backup it didn't detect any partitions. I started to freak because I have had most of those files for over a year and I have a lot of stuff I need. I ran fdisk, didn't detect any partitions, I tried the Gentoo LiveCD, still nothing, I tried to save myself with SpinRite, still no luck. I have tried everything I can think of to get my data back.

If anyone knows *ANYTHING* that could help get my data back I would be very gratefull. (it was formated with XFS)

I'm not clear on what you did here. So correct me if I am wrong.

You had a hard drive that crashed. You moved that to the slave on your ide controller and set up a new master. That master was hosting some OS that you were making backup copies from to the slave drive (the drive the had crashed). All was working fine until the other day when it would no longer boot. The reason for this was somehow your bios was set to boot the second drive. Is this correct so far?

So now you booted from CD and installed SuSE 10.1 on the first drive. Since you did this you cannot mount the second drive to pull the backups off of correct? In fact, all OS's you have tried will not read any partition tables on the second drive.

When you were making the backups are you sure they were going to the second drive?

What are the sizes of your hard drives?

dann wrote:I'm not clear on what you did here. So correct me if I am wrong.

You had a hard drive that crashed. You moved that to the slave on your ide controller and set up a new master. That master was hosting some OS that you were making backup copies from to the slave drive (the drive the had crashed). All was working fine until the other day when it would no longer boot. The reason for this was somehow your bios was set to boot the second drive. Is this correct so far?

So now you booted from CD and installed SuSE 10.1 on the first drive. Since you did this you cannot mount the second drive to pull the backups off of correct? In fact, all OS's you have tried will not read any partition tables on the second drive.

yeah thats all correct, except it is SUSE 10.0

dann wrote:When you were making the backups are you sure they were going to the second drive?

What are the sizes of your hard drives?

I am positive I backed up to the right drive since I couldn't mount /dev/sda (my main 300GB drive) to /media/backup (since it was already mounted to /) and my backup/pos drive was big enough to hold a complete backup of everything since I had only used about 50GB (it is a 70GB drive). My other drive is a very old (and surprisingly more reliable) 20GB drive which had the old backup on it.

Summary:
300GB main drive - now has SUSE 10.0 on it
70GB pos drive - says it has nothing on it but should have my whole Gentoo system on it
20GB backup drive - has a really old backup without my videos and some of the other stuff I need