Disk Recovery suggestions welcomed...

[dsr at tao.merseine.nu]

On Thu, Dec 15, 2005 at 02:46:13PM -0500, Don Levey wrote:
> Last weekend, just before I left the continent on a trip, one of the
> partitions on my family server's hard drive seems to have crashed.  In
> particular, I had a separate partition for /home, and the system (after
> several power failures overnight) eventually refused to boot up with read
> errors on /home.
> 
> I've found a few suggestions for diagnostics - output from e2fsck and
> smartctl are below.  I'm hoping for one of two things (if not both):
> 1) Is there any way to repair/work around this problem, and
> 2) Is there any way to mount the partition even temporarily so I can recover
> the data?
> 
> [root at davinci log]# e2fsck -c /dev/hda3
> e2fsck 1.35 (28-Feb-2004)
> /home1: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while
> reading block 524

See if this works:

e2fsck -b 32768 /dev/hda3

Use e2fsck -n to see where extra superblocks would be stored,
and pass those locations on to -b.

Get a 60GB or larger drive, make a partition on it the same size
or slightly larger than hda3, and copy the original partition over to it
directly:

dd if=/dev/hda3 of=/dev/hdd1

-dsr-