Douglas A. Tutty wrote:
Backups before the crash? You need a functioning system. Don't power up that crashed disk until you are ready to pull all readable sectors off it into one image file. There are dedicated programmes to do this and will do multiple read tries. Note that this does not involve mounting the disk. Use aptitude search functions to find programs for disk recovery.
There is gddrescue, which is intended for data recovery. http://debaday.debian.net/2007/12/12/gddrescue-a-tool-for-recovering-data-from-damaged-media/ apt-get install gddrescue Note that the executable program is called ddrescue. -- Raj Kiran