A shot in the dark

[David de Groot]

Peter Lauda wrote:
> 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.

Whooaaa there... In my experience, reiserfs and bad disks mean you're 
*totally* out of luck. For some reason the fault recovery on an broken 
disk with reiserfs is absolutely nil.

As mentioned by others you might get lucky with a dd image of the disk, 
or with professional data recovery services, but I wouldn't expect much.

Dave