I have passed the drive off to a data recovery house but if the drive is recovered and the drive is still intact when it's all over I will try this out for personal practice. Thank you!! Madison Robert Brockway wrote:

On Mon, 29 Dec 2003, Madison Kelly wrote:

Hi Maddy. I hope you got some sleep last night...

...

I know that backups of the superblock are made, do you know by chance how to locate them and/or how to tell the OS to use one for mounting? Also, at

No one mentioned this (and I didn't read TLUG yesterday) so here it is:

/sbin/dumpe2fs /dev/hdxy (where xy is a1, b2, etc) will give you this info. There is quite a lot of output so redirect it to a file and read it with less, eg:

/sbin/dumpe2fs /dev/hde3 > /tmp/hde3.info

Search for the word "Superblock"

Now, take that number and use it with e2fsck -b,

Eg I have "Superblock at 163840" listed for /dev/hde3, so I could try:

e2fsck -b 163840 /dev/hde3.

Remember to only work on backup copies! See below.

...

least two partitions on the drive have gone bad...

Different filesystems (partitions) being bad makes it far less likely it is a filesystem problem.

Also, the use of dd was mentioned. This is good but there is no need to write it to a physical drive. You can write the dd to a file and mount it using loopback and attempt recovery on that. As long as you keep a good copy of the filesystem file around you can keep trying things over and over on copies.

Good luck.

Rob

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