techlists@comcast.net spake the following on 6/15/2006 7:23 AM:

As a follow up, I was able to find a *free* program to attempt to recover my lost data. (I can't find the name of the program in a quick search, if anyone's interested I'll check my system at home tonight and post it).

The software was able to see the lost partitions, but there was a huge amount of CRC errors in trying to read the disk. So I suspect there was a failure of the physical drive itself, more than just mere corruption of the partition table. This was a drive that fell on the floor once, but seemed ok when I installed Centos on it, so I left it in the system. Maybe it was already weak, and the erratic electricity killed it for good.

I was able to recover quite a bit of lost data, but a lot of it appears to be gone forever. This is a good reminder on the importance of keeping backups of important stuff.

Paul

Another lesson... Never use a dropped hard drive for critical data. Some drives still use glass for the platters, but even the aluminum platter drives don't like more than a 1 or 2 G's in a fall. Hitting a hard floor from 3 feet could easily hit 6 or more G's of force. Drives are cheap, recovery services are expensive.