thelinuxlink.net

I have a drive with a ReiserFS partition that recently bit the dust. Tonight was trying to load up pan, when it locked up. Couldn't drop out of X, couldnt restart X, couldn't log in via SSH on another machine, etc. Totally locked up. I hit the button to restart, when it gives the GRUB error of 17 when I try to boot, before I can even get to the grub boot menu for selecting OS. And when I use a liveCD and try to mount it, I get a bad superblock error. Is The drive doesnt seem to be totally dead, as other partitions will mount fine. Is there anyway I can try to recover data from that partition? I know its possible on NTFS and Fat32 partitions that have gone tits up (have software for doing that since I've had to do it several times for people who run windows). Any help would be nice because that partition has some really important data that is newer than my most recent backup, and can't afford to pay for a data recovery service.

Thanks in advance.

take a look at reiserfsck...

I was kinda hoping for a nondestructive one. I'd prefer to have something read it only and then work and output stuff to another location, such as another drive.

Right now with it dead, I dont have another drive to create a back up image onto, and would hate to have things screwed up if reiserfsck flubbed the partition (as I've heard happening).

EDIT: Did some check, and yeah, the drive is having issues, so I dont want to write back to it. Can I run reiserchk on an image?

I don't see why you could not run reiserfsck on an image. I've run fsck and fsck.msdos on images in the past.

Ok then, next up, freeing up space on another drive, to put the image on.

If the drive has physical damage and is beginning to fail, it's just a matter of time before the whole thing dies. The more you run it, the quicker it will die.

Gomer, yeah, I know that, and thats why that machine has been sitting turned off since the drive died. I booted a liveCD and ran it quick enough to check for bad sectors, but that was it.