ReiserFS data retrieval or restore

[Srayven]

I had Fedora 7 previously installed on a system with two hard drives. During this installation I let Fedora pick my settings for me, including the formatting of the second hdd. The smaller HDD contained the OS and swap space and the second 180g hdd contained photos music etc. Everything ran great until the OS disk died. I got a new disk and installed Fedora 9, but did not touch the larger harddrive. Now I would really like to get the latest pictures off the disk or better yet, just mount the harddrive and use it! The disk is installed as the slave drive on the same IDE channel as the primary hdd. The /dev contains a /dev/sdb1 entry. Doing file -s /dev/sdb1 prints /dev/sdb1: ReiserFS V3.6 block size 4096 num blocks 48837584 r5 hash. However, trying to mount the hdd with "mount -t reiserfs /dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdb1" prints: mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try dmesg | tail or so

dmesg says ReiserFS: sdb1: found reiserfs format "3.6" with standard journal
ReiserFS: sdb1: using ordered data mode
ReiserFS: sdb1: warning: sh-462: bad transaction max size (4294967295). FSCK?
ReiserFS: sdb1: warning: sh-2022: reiserfs_fill_super: unable to initialize journal space

Is there anything I can do to at least retrieve the data off this disk? I dont have a problem reformatting the drive if I can get the data from it first.

and before anyone says that I need to start backing up...I do, I just do it weekly and missed the last few pictures that were uploaded!

Thanks in advance!!

[SlowJet]

"I let Fedora pick my settings for me, including the formatting of the second hdd."

The default installer would have created LVM with ext3.

If you installed Fedora 9 on sda only you may have clobbered the LVM of the sdb.
(there was a detailed post on how to recovery the stranded PV on a second drive not long ago.)

If you installed F7 with something like Linux reisers but did not actually use the custom partitioning to format with reisers, and unchecked the sdb disk from installer usage, then you would have LVM ext3 on sba.
Same for F9

So what did you really do for F7 and F9?

SJ

[Srayven]

Please bear with me, this computer was setup a while ago and I dont remember exactly how I set it up. First I installed the primary hdd: sda1 as ext3. The second hdd was not hooked up. I get F7 up and running and then added the secondary hdd sdb1 using system-config-lvm. I am not sure why reiserFS was used and I dont remember choosing that (I originally thought I was using ext3, but I was wrong).

I did a similar process with F9 after sda1 failed: installed F9 without the second harddrive and then hooked up the second disk. I did nothing else to the second harddrive except look at the drive in system-config-lvm and try to mount the drive from /dev/sdb1... I apologize for the lack of knowledge about this install, but I am trying to learn Linux/Fedora...so please bear with me! :)

If there is any information I can give you let me know, I will do my best! Thanks!

[robert.forster]

I had something close to me happen
here is what I did to solve the problem

sudo yum install testdisk

as root change to a directory that has enough room for your files to reside
run testdisk and you see all the options which one is copy files I think was the description