Ext3 drive will not mount after power failure; how to recover files?

"The problems you're having sound far more extensive than what I'd expect from mere loss of power (even during fairly heavy write activity) on a device. I have to wonder if you're really having more problems at the interface/driver level, or a corrupted partition table or something of that sort.

From the sounds of things you may have exacerbated the problem further with all the thrashing around you've done while trying to fix the issue.

I don't know if we can help with this case but don't give up yet.

For the future I'd suggest that you learn the following technique:

When you have trouble with a drive under Linux or UNIX you can usually use dd to make a bit-image copy of the whole device to some other location. Find a drive that's at least as large as the one in question and try a command like: dd if=$PROBLEMATIC of=$TARGET bs=4M ... be very careful about the if (input file) and of (output file) directives. Leave that run. It's a good idea to run tail -f /var/log/messages & (or possible variant as appropriate to your /etc/syslog.conf) ... either do that in the background or in another window. There are enhanced versions of dd which can handle retries and continuing past bad blocks more robustly (sdd is a name that comes to mind). But try just using the stock GNU dd command at first.

You can make such a copy of the whole device (/dev/sdd, for example) or just the partition (/dev/sdd1). If you get ""short read or similar errors then it suggests that either the device has physical errors preventing reads past certain cylinders or, in the case of a partition, that the partition table is mangled in some way. You can even make two different dd images ... one of each.

Here's the trick: do all your fsck and mount attempts, and use your various other recovery tools such as TCT (The Coroner's Toolkit) on the copied image!

This minimizes the time spent running the drive (which is possibly degrading at the hardware level as you operate it) and minimizes the impact of failed and possibly misguided recovery attempts. (In some situations you make one image, then another based on that and always operate on the tertiary image ... depends on how much the data is worth).

I personally suggest that you run something like hexdump or strings to read through the image ... just let it scroll past for a long time and look for plain text that looks like it might be fragments of your data. I have used grep to recover useful (textual) data from otherwise completely mangled filesystems. In case I'm not suggesting it as data recovery heroics ... but as a sanity check. If you scroll through 10s of megabytes or a few gigabytes of data and don't see any recognizable text ... then you probably have a hopeless case or you've done something very wrong (were you really careful about those if= and of= options?).

I don't know if any of this will help you with the current effort. But learn these tricks now and they will definitely make your next foray into data recovery much less scary. (Yes, practice on a healthy system once or twice --- go use a hex editor and try adding your own creative corruption here and there --- to the COPY of course! Then try fix it).

Oh, and this is a really good time to review your backup and data recovery plans and procedures (or provide better advice to your customer/colleague/client/friend/whatever)."

"Backtrack
is a linux distro that comes packaged with a host of tools for things like this. It is also, however, aimed squarely at the upper echelon of power users. Their website may have some good tutorials for using their tools, so that may be of use to you."

If you can boot with livecd while booting use no swap and then you can mount that /dev/sda and copy all the data from there if you have USB HDD or over the network. Then you can reboot the system reformat and dump back data.