ext3 drive failed fsck and won't mount.

[crabbypup]

umm, my drive shut itself off during a partition shrink/move operation. (it had taken it over 20 hours to do this operation)
it is a 500gb SATA II drive and it used to have an ext3 partition filling it.. it was in a usb enclosure at the time.
the e2fsck won't run with the default superblock, saying it is corrupt. i found a block it would run with: 884736. i haven't tried anything past that so far.
i heard on another forum that removing the journal (thus transforming it into an ext2 partition) would allow mounting for data recovery.
i need to get about 250gb off of it in important files that i don't have backups for. the drive itself is about 1 month old and i am currently running puppy 4.00 off of a live cd. i now have it connected using the sata port.

first off, any suggestions? secondly, how can i remove the journal? it wasn't very specific in the post.

please help me and my foolish ways!!

[Bruce B]

500GB Maxtor Seagate or something with 500GB had serious firmware problems. They made a firmware fix which rendered the disks dead. Something you need to look into while you're at it.

tune2fs -O ^has_journal /dev/XXXX

on unmounted device, removes journal

Puppy as a rescue disk? Really now, what benefit could mounting all partitions, running find on each one several times, then umounting the partitions have on a partition in distress?

[crabbypup]

well, it was rendered un-mountable by ubuntu. so now i am trying to at least mount it. right now it is doing an

e2fsck -v -b 2654208 -f -y /dev/sda1

but when it is done i will attept to remove the journal and mount it.

[crabbypup]

the disk is a western digital wd5000aavs with green power. i had tried the tune2fs command previously and it failed to do the operation, complaining about bad superblocks and a few other things... i don't remember what they were now.

[Aitch]

Try Trinity Rescue Kit LiveCD

http://trinityhome.org/Home/index.php?w ... ront_id=12

Type help at prompt for info

The Testdisk utility runs from the menu

Aitch

[crabbypup]

i am using photorec and it's going well so far... i think... it is showing files i never had on the drive... such as mandriva and suse linux bootloader files and other things like that. i did have about 40gb of .iso's on there... could it be uncompressing them??? oh well. it's going ok so far. i have recovered nearly 16gb so far. ( i have to do it in batches, there is no other drive that has enough space for all the data other than my laptop ) how much does .tar.gzip compressing offer?

thanks to all! crabby (aka. kvella)