I would first start troubleshooting everything. Change jumper settings, ide channel, ribbon cables, etc. I'd also grep through your system logs, see if dmesg outputs any info about the drive failing when you boot up your system. You could also try the drive in a windows machine to see if it even recognizes it in the disk manager. Also, I'd try it on another motherboard or IDE controller. One more thing, you could see if your BIOS support SMART, and try toggling that on/off. If you can get the os to see your /dev/hdd device, you can try copying the disk bit by bit to a spare you have laying around (same size or bigger), or to a file on your OS drive (if large enough). using the dd command, this can be easily accomplished (on a working drive, that is). dd if=/dev/hdd of=/dev/hdx(second drive) replace of=/dev/hdx with a file path if you want to do it that way, e.x. of=/home/user/file If you can do that successfully, you now have a 1 to 1 copy of your drive, including any errors that were on it. You can now safely try to recover your corrupt partition on the copy, without the risk of further damaging the original. One thing I've done in the past to recover a corrupt partition table, is basically rewrite the partition table (if you know the original partition boundaries and types). Disclaimer: Be sure you aren't formatting said partition, only write over the partition table. Feel free to contact me off list about this, in the past I've recovered quite a few drives using gnu/linux tools. Andy On Mon, Sep 22, 2008 at 9:50 PM, p.daniels <teeahr1 at gmail.com> wrote: > Yep, it looks pretty grim. The IDE cable to my music drive had a frayed > end, and now this morning on boot, fsck said "no such file or directory > when trying to open /dev/sdd1. The superblock could not be read or does > not describe a correct ext2 filesystem. If the device is valid and it really > contains an ext2 filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then > the superblock is corrupt and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate > superblock: > e2fsck -b 8193 <device>". Running fsck manually gives the same message. > > Parted and fdisk no longer see sdd at all. It's just gone. I've tried > swapping it out and putting a different drive in there and it detects fine, > and the bad drive doesn't work no matter where I try it (in another machine > and in a USB enclosure) so I don't think it's the connection. I am at a > total loss. Does anyone have any advice in this situation? Everything I know > about data recovery I've learned in the last (completely fruitless) 12 > hours, so I may well be missing an obvious trick. God, I hope so. > > -pete > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20080923/22eeb439/attachment.htm