cleaning my OP up some.

The drive I have has bad blocks on the outer edge of the HD platter (60800 to ~95000) and I believe this is also where my ext2/3 partition information is located. I am unable to mount this drive. I also didn’t have proper backups in place for this drive.

Here’s what I’ve done so far: (Running Ubuntu Server 8.10)

1. Trying to mount the drive results in errors (must specify filesystem type) even though it’s ext3

2. Ran fdsk on the bad device (dev/sdb)
a. Confirms linux native partition exists (ID 83 – linux native)

3. Ran ddrrescue
a. Command: sudo ddrescue /dev/sdb /dev/sdc /home/ddrescue.log
b. It ran across errors but recovered a lot of data then went back to bad blocks and recovered some more data

4. Trying to mount /dev/sdc results in the same error #1
a. Ddrescue wasn’t able to recover the bad blocks regarding my partition

5. Off to e2fsck now
a. Ran this: sudo e2sfck /dev/sdc which resulted in error
i. Can’t read super block try alternative block locations and “bad magic number error”
b. I used testdisk to provide the super blocks numbers however
i. Sudo e2fsck -b /dev/sdb
ii. Results in the same error

6. Using testdisk to look at my linux partition gets listed twice. The how to document for testdisk suggest if this happens, your filesystem is corrupted. The testdisk information online is a little vague per my knowledge level of this issue.

I’m at a loss on what to try next. Is this drive down for the count? Any help greatly appreciated.

ugh..

5.b.i should state, i've tried every superblock listed with no luck. same error.

How much data did ddrescue *not* get and why did you quit? Did it stop putting out data altogether?

If you've gotten all the data you can from the drive and you have tried alternate superblocks, then the next alternative is to use file carving.