160gb hard drive listed as "210mb filesystem" - trying to recover files

[gusblake]

Hi,

a few days ago my Fedora 12 x64 installation started giving me an error before startup ('disk boot failure, insert system disk to continue') and wouldn't boot.

I put a new drive in and reinstalled with the same installation disc, then plugged the old drive back in to see if I could get any of the files back.

The drive didn't appear in Computer, so I tried it with a USB enclosure and was able to see a 210mb filesystem with some system files in it.

From what I've been reading, it seems like the 210mb filesystem is a partition, but my files are on a different one which can't be seen for some reason.

I tried using

dd if=/dev/disk/by-uuid/1d7cecc3-ddb8-4fca-9363-21f1f19bd209 of=/home/gus/160/test

but the output is:

409600+0 records in
409600+0 records out
209715200 bytes (210 MB) copied, 13.8308 s, 15.2 MB/s

and the file 'test' is 210mb, so that's no good.

This is what I can see in the 210mb filesystem:

lost+found (directory)
efi (directory)
grub (directory)
config-2.6.31.6-166.fc12.x86_64
config-2.6.31.9-174.fc12.x86_64
System.map-2.6.31.6-166.fc12.x86_64
System.map-2.6.31.9-174.fc12.x86_64
vmlinuz-2.6.31.6-166.fc12.x86_64
vmlinuz-2.6.31.9-174.fc12.x86_64
initramfs-2.6.31.6-166.fc12.x86_64.img
initramfs-2.6.31.9-174.fc12.x86_64.img

The fact that some files can be read makes me think the hard drive might not be entirely dead. What do you think is the best way to go with this?

Cheers,
Gus

[Rubberman]

It sounds like something may have munged the partition table on the drive. Was there a system crash (kernel panic), or serious power surge/brown-out recently? If the actual file system didn't get too badly munged, you can probably restore the boot-loader/partition table at least well enough to recover your data. You would use fdisk to do that. Hopefully you remember the location/sizes of the partitions on the disc...

[coopstah13]

that looks like a /boot partition based on the files inside it