I have a very large amount of data(5 gigs) I would like to recover from a trashed reiserfs parition. Yes 5 gigs is just the stuff I want. The parition itself is 19gig.

The drive can no longer be mounted, and reiserfsck --fix-fixable, --rebuild-sb and --rebuild-tree all fail.

I tried testdisk
to no avail. It can see only the first level of subdirectories in / on the drive and no more.I don't believe something ludicrous has happened, like the drive heads only being able to move past a certain spot, because I can grep -a the drive for strings I know are there (like "slashdot" :=) ) and the drive is accessed fine and I get lots of results.

Is manual recovery the only way now? And if it is, how would I go about it?

I've decided I have better things to do than try to recover mp3's with a sector editor. I am using the "strings" command to dump any plaintext that's there that I might want some day to a file called data, and then I am going to reformat it as ext2.

Sorry Im not posting a suggestion or help for your problem, but I have a question.
How was the filesystem ruined? Was it a hardware problem?
Ive been using reiserfs for a while and have never had any trouble and would like to know if theres something I should watch out for.
Thanks.

A day ago, I had a problem but it was a line in one of my PAM or security files. Upon booting, LINUX didn't mount the drives because of that stupid line in the file that I edited. None of my drives weren't mounted, so I ran fdisk to see what the drives come up as. There were not in the normal device path for example /dev/hda1. I had to reboot because it was in a read-only like state. I selected failsafe in LILO and it login me as a single user. I ran fdisk to see if the drives were in their normal directory. They were not. I then ran fsck.ext3 instead running fsck. It fixed everything and I edit the file that I changed before all this happen.

If you are unable to get the files from your partition. Find a local data recovery service and have them extract the files.

Next time find an online data storage and upload your MP3s or backup using CDs.

Electro, all three of your suggestions to me cost money. I download the stuff for free in the first place, and it's not worth it to me to bother backing all of that stuff up. My text documents and apache DocumentRoot I periodically zip and backup because I can't replace them easily.

m0rl0ck, at first I though it was due to several improper shutdowns, but my understanding is that with a journalling system like reiserfs, this shouldn't have been such an issue. I have reformatted this disk with ext2, and started to install linux to it again, only to get the same errors I was having before, so I believe this is actually a bad drive, although I think it is strange that partitioning and formatting it wouldn't detect it. I am going to run some Norton disk utilities and see if I can figure out what's going on.

I had problems with a new drive I bought recently. I could create all the partitions and create a new file system on it but as soon as I started using the filesystem it would lock up or just give errors. First I thought it had to do with DMA modes because it wasn't complaining about the partitioning or creating filesystems, but it turned out the HD itself was messed up. I download the test tools from the manufacturer of the drive and it failed on all the tests. So I got it replaced and the current one has been running without a hickup so far.

Gantrep, why is the above cost you money. To me it cost me a few minutes of my time.

Whats the cost of one CD-R.mmm about a few US cents. Much cheaper if you buy in bulk.

For internet data storage, I use streamload. It has unlimited space and it is very cheap. X-drive is little on the expensive side.

Gantrep, you could have a virus embedded on one of the sectors that several programs can not scan it.

Sure cd-r's are cheap, but the absolute cheapest I could buy a cd-burner for is 30-40 dollars.

I kind of doubt the virus theory, first of all because viruses for linux are so rare, but also because viruses that are resistant to repartitioning and formatting with a completely different filesystem are pretty darn rare as well.