combining unused space into files

["Richard E. Hawkins" <hawk@hawkins.ds.psu.edu>]

I thought I sent this earlier, but it doesn't seem to have arrived . . .

IN my last-ditch attempt to recover a long text (actually lyx) file that
was deleted, I want to combine all of the unused space on my drive into 
files.  There's about 80M altogether, and I want to break it into 10M pieces
(so I can manipulate them in the 40M partition normally assigned for 
swap).

I want to get a literal straight read of the disk.  Can anyone point
out how to do this.

To complicate matters, the machine has no netwerok connectivity;
it's a laptop, and the pcmcia hardware seems to have gone south . . .

hawk