FILE RECOVERY SOFTWARE?

[Matt Graham]

On 2013-10-11 16:08, Mike Bushroe wrote:
> computer has three drives. The windoze drive boots and works. Even
> booting Ubuntu install in diskless trial version, I can't get it to
> mount the other two driver, or even get gparted to admit that they
> exist.

This is a bad sign, usually meaning that the partition table's been 
erased or the disks themselves are having hardware problems.  If the 
partition tables are bad, you could try the "findpart" utility.  If the 
bad disk is /dev/sdb , you can tell if the disk is having hardware 
problems by trying "dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1" and 
seeing if that gets you an I/O error or not.  The output of dmesg can 
also tell you if a disk is having trouble.

> recover from backup disks (a whole stack of dvdr disks that now I
> don't seem to be able to read).

Is your DVD drive old/failing?  If so, there are a bunch of us who have 
newer/working DVD drives.  One of us could probably help out there.

> I probably formatted the old drives in reiserfs

They say that reiserfsck handles things less gracefully than ext3 in 
certain failure modes.  Years ago, I had "reiserfsck --rebuild-tree" 
recover everything from a partition that had been randomly scribbled, 
though.

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