A shot in the dark

[Peter Lauda]

I've got a customer system that was running RH 2.4.29 on an 80GB SATA HD. They did not heed our advice to use our remote backup service. Nor did they do any local backup, also against our recommendation. Ok.. the disclaimers are in.

I am going to try to retrieve their data from the disk but the things I've tried so far are not working. No surprise really. Maybe one of the guru's here will have another idea I can try. If so, please enlighten me.

The data lives on a reiserfs of roughly 70GB. Whenever I try to use reiserfsck I get a cannot read block 3964928 ' message and it exits. I can't use the -B option because it then tells me that this block cannot be relocated because it is reiserfs system area. 

In fdisk I am seeing that all partitions appear not to end on cylinder boundaries and wonder if that is mistakenly reported because of this problem, or if it is itself the problem.  The reiserfs tools I had were a bit old so I grabbed 3.6.19, compiled the packages and used them to no benefit other than I can specify the badblocks list now... but still no go on the fsck.

Any one have any idea how I can get the data off of this drive? I even tried dd'ing the entire device t another disk. It goes along fine until it hits that bad block and then spins in circles with an input/output error. 

I fear this is a case of... close the barn door because the horses are out... but I promised them I would try.

Cheers!
--p
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