data recovery from a fedora 5 system

[Tim Chase]

> for several years i've been running a fedora core 5 system that seriously 
> crashed the other day.
> it was caused by a faulty power supply.
> 
> This part is fixed now, but now I don't know to recover data from the 
> harddrive.

If the power-supply was the only thing that died, replacing it 
should be sufficient and the rest of the system should just come 
back up.  You might have to run a fsck on the drive when it 
boots, but it should be fine.  I've had this happen to me 
uneventfully.

If for some reason the hard-drive crashed, you have deeper 
problems.  The first thing to do would be to put it in another 
machine and image it using the "dd" command.  Assuming this 
defunct hard-drive is /dev/sdb you can use

   dd if=/dev/sdb of=image.dsk

Alternatively, you can copy the drive image remotely from another 
machine by booting a CD/flash drive on your old machine and then 
from your new/good machine use:

   scp brian at oldmachine:/dev/sdb image.dsk

If you *can* image the disk, you've got a chance of rescuing your 
files.  However, if you can't even get a disk image, you may be 
out of luck and have to use a recent backup or send the drive to 
a drive-salvage company to get them to extract the content for a 
large price-tag.

With that drive image, you can then try to mount that file on a 
loopback device as read-only to salvage your files.  If that 
fails, you might try to use tools like "ddrescue" or "foremost". 
  Kyle Rankin authored a good Linux Journal article on using 
ddrescue.

   http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/10360

If that doesn't work you can try

   foremost -t all -i image.dsk

to pull all the files that foremost knows how to find (it only 
recognizes certain file-types).  Both are available in my 
standard Debian & Ubuntu repositories.

Hope this helps,

-tim