recovering FC3 from a bad superblock

[Greg Rundlett]

Removing the affected laptop drive, and attaching it to another laptop
via USB/external drive case, I did make a copy of the /var/ /etc/ and
/home/ dirs before attempting any further recovery.  Since I could see
the filesystem when mounting from a rescue disk, I wanted to make
backups before anything got worse.  That turned out to be a life-saver
b/c when I ran the mke2fs command, it gave me the backup superblock
locations, but also seemed to wipe the whole filesystem clean.  I
swear I put in the -n option (reading the man page and Derek's
advice).  But, that's what backups are for ;-)

Since the whole partition contents were gone, I set about
re-installing FC3 from DVD, installing 'everything' (I'm sure that
people have opinions on why this is a bad/good idea).  The Windows
partition was cleanly intact, and since I already had cygwin installed
there, I left it alone.  The FC3 install went without a hitch, and the
ensuing 1,000+ updates from a local network repo cache took about all
day.

I then spent the next day and a half re-installing non-packaged
software like scribus, java and KDiff3, phpmyadmin; configuring
browser extensions and plugins; copying over all my backed-up
directories, files, symlinks and fixing permissions etc.  Plus, I had
to restore/merge various configuration files like httpd.conf,
/etc/hosts, /etc/my.cnf, cron...

It is truly amazing how much time and effort goes into installing and
customizing/personalizing a system.  Back at Virtual Access Networks,
we created a product that managed and migrated computer
'personalities' for Windows.  That product still exists today in the
form of Symantec software, and other vendors.  I wish something like
that existed for Linux.  (Of course it wouldn't help recover a bad
disk, but it would be a great backup tool.)  The nuance is that
settings can be migrated from one OS/app version to another.  So to
use my case as an example:  I could create a backup / hose my hardware
/ install a fresh system and even if the new system used a different
version of GIMP or Firefox, I could automatically migrate my
application settings.

Thanks for the help.  Thanks also to those who /join #gnhlug on irc.freenode.net