If at all possible, the first thing you should do is to backup that partition. The ways I can think of doing that is to either use a second hard drive, send the data over the network to another computer that has space, or possibly use a USB flash drive.
Please be sure you understand what you are doing before you do this. If you don't understand, ask first.
dd is a utility that can read a partition or file bit for bit. The way you will use it here, it won't care what any of those bits mean, it will just make an exact copy. If you don't use compression (which will take longer) you will need at least 11 GB to store the backup. You can reduce this size by piping it through
gzip first. This will take longer, but will reduce the size of your backup --
possibly to as little as about 4 GB.
The following commands (use only one) show the possibilities. I am assuming the partition you are trying to recover is
/dev/sda2. If it is some other partition, or called something else, adjust the command accordingly.
Code:
dd if=/dev/sda2 of=<name of destination file or partition>
dd if=/dev/sda2 | ssh <user or root>@<remote computer> "cat > <name of destination file or partition>"
dd if=/dev/sda2 | gzip > <name of destination file>
dd if=/dev/sda2 | gzip | ssh <user or root>@<remote computer> "cat > <name of destination file>"
Again, please ask first if you are at all uncertain about the command you are about to run.
I strongly advise using one of these methods to backup that partition before trying anything else so that you will always be able to return to your starting point. You may also wish to wait a little while before trying anything to see if anybody else posts any better ideas.
After backing up the partition, try running
and see what shows up.
