I have a hard drive that sort of died recently. For the most part it was working normally but whenever I tried to "cd /" it would stall for a long period of time. This got worse and worse until I finally made a fatal mistake.... Not suspecting the drive was the problem and in a moment of weakness I decided to reboot to try and fix the problem... It never worked again...

I will attribute my poor judgement to having spent so much time in the past working with "other" OSes where rebooting is your main trouble-shooting tool. Sometimes you have uncontrolled flash-backs and fall into old habits...

That being said, while I do have backups of all my most critical items there was some other things I wouldn't mind recovering if possible.

The drive is still recognized in the BIOS etc. but it simply won't mount under linux. Error is:

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdc1, or too many mounted file systems

I've also tried mount with the "mount -o sb=xxx" option specifying some alternative superblocks as determined by calling "mke2fs -n /dev/hdc1" all to no avail.

Seems likely that the drive is 100% dead at this point but if anyone has any tricks they could pass along I'd like to give them a whirl. I didn't find much by the way of google.

Very much appreciate if anyone has any ideas.

On an entirely related note, does anyone have a good script (possibly using rsync) for keeping files up-to-date between a desktop and a laptop by way of a central server ?

Thanks.