thanks to all that commented.
I managed to recover just about everything.
here are the steps I took:
1. removed the cover of the external caddy to help keep it cool, and moved it away from any other hard-drives or laptops
that might heat it
2. backed up the drive - "dd -if=/dev/sdb -of=/mnt/tb1/200gb.bak.img" (took two days...)
3. ran testdisk to get some basic data about the drive
4. manually ran e2fsck on the drive, using a piece of lego and a pterry book to keep the enter key pressed down
(/thousands/ of errors the "-p" flag was bailing). had to upgrade e2fsck because the version I had couldn't handle
extents errors
finally, had to upgrade the kernel to 2.6.29 so I could load ext4 without the journal (journal was corrupted).
next step is to get a new drive and copy the files off the damaged drive.
in all, I'm not sure I lost much at all, and there were only 671 files and directories moved to lost+found. the original
names for them can be figured out over time.
thanks all,
kae
Maintained by the ILUG website team. The aim of Linux.ie is to
support and help commercial and private users of Linux in Ireland. You can
display ILUG news in your own webpages, read backend
information to find out how. Networking services kindly provided by HEAnet, server kindly donated by
Dell. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds,
used with permission. No penguins were harmed in the production or maintenance
of this highly praised website. Looking for the
Indian Linux Users' Group? Try here. If you've read all this and aren't a lawyer: you should be!
