Recovering from a Hard Drive Failure

"The system update went without indecent and the kernel compiled and installed without error. The next step was to reboot into the new kernel. When the kernel panic'ed, I figured that I had missed something in the kernel configuration, so I rebooted back to my older kernel, which also panic'ed. Since this system had been running not 15 minutes ago, I knew things were about to get ugly.

"At this point, I remembered that I had been doing some testing with an Ubuntu live CD, so I booted the live CD. At least now, I could get some work done, even though my workstation was "toes up." This would also give me a platform from which to work on my regular hard drive, or so I though. When I attempted to mount /dev/sda3, I was told that it didn't exist. Fdisk told me that my partition table was mostly gone! All that was left was /dev/sda1, where I keep my kernel, and /dev/sda2, which is where I swap. I posted a message describing my situation to the Gentoo user's group and was told that I should look into a program called testdisk"

Complete Story

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