
Re: Hard disk data recovery..
(You haven't specified that your harddisk was physically damaged or file system got corrupted)
1. Do NOT run any of the filesystem repair utilities. Trying to repair the file system might cause even more damage.
2. Find someplace to store the contents of the partition in question. This would be uncompressed space. So if the partition is 100 GB, you will need 100 GB of storage space available to you, and NOT on the damaged drive. This step usually involves hooking up another hard drive, and making sure it's working and mounted.
3. Create a byte image of the damaged partition. There are three tools that I know off that can do this (without exploring specialized recovery systems).
dd - this is usually available with a default install of Linux.
ddrescue - this software is more or less a wrapper for the appropriate dd commands (easiest explanation I can think off)
dd_rescue - this is very similar to ddrescue (notice the underscore difference), except that it will ignore errors and continue processing.
Of these, I prefer dd_rescue, which is available from FreshMeat. I find its relatively straight forward to use, and I don't need to mess with arcane parameters to make it do what is needed. But, newer versions of dd can also ignore errors if you tell it to.
4. Mount the image
5. Copy the files from the mounted image to another hard drive.