Further Developments on the Hard Drive Front

For those that are curious, I’m still working off the Windows partition on my x40, and have thus far been unable to recover the information from my corrupt Linux root partition. I do, however, have two potential avenues to recovery: dumping the partition into a navigable ISO file using dd, and a commercial software package from Nucleus Data Recovery. The current plan is to try the former as soon as I get some semblance of a network setup (I brought a dual CPU Ubuntu server with me, but thus far have no office and no network), and use the latter in the event the former fails.

The Nucleus package, Kernel for ReiserFS (anybody used it?), is able to see data on the partition, which is good, but spreads it out over 1600 atificially created directories, which is bad. It could, however, end up being my only option for recovering the data. In which case I’ll have to go that route, $429 price tag or no.

I also will need to order a replacement hard drive, because as the Reiser tools say, while it’s not guaranteed that I’ll have other bad blocks I just can’t take that chance.

Before I forget, I’d like to thank both the Gentoo and Ubuntu communities for their very kind, and very detailed, assistance with my problem. I’ve solicited input on both user forums, and the responses have been hugely helpful in trying to formulate an approach that might be effective for recovering said data, not to mention answering my questions along the way, such as “Can you dd to a network share?” (Yes). Community is probably the single most important reason I’m still running Linux after all this time, and is among the most important differentiators from distribution to distribution. I really can’t say enough positive things about the people behind both Gentoo and Ubuntu; commercial OS distributions would have a very difficult time matching the level of service I receive.