System Recovery

[Labitt, Bruce]

What tools are available for recovery of a linux system?  I have no idea
what happened - but my system took a dump.  SciLinux5.2 (RHEL5.2).  I
make it through the text mode then go into the x detail mode.  I get a
lot of daemons failing and the odd lines that say stuff like:

touch cannot touch /var/lock/subsys : Not a directory

can't create /var/run/dhclient-eth1.pid: Not a directory

touch cannot touch 'var/lock/subsys/netplugd': Not a directory


Then the line "Starting system logger:"  which takes minutes to complete
- lots of failed module loads follow then I'm dumped out of X mode and
get a text display which states

"Server Authorization directory (daemon/ServAuthDir) is set to /var/gdm
but this does not exist.  Please correct GDM configuration and restart
GDM."


This all happened when I started a K3b format of a DVD+RW disk - if it
matters...  The system rebooted on me and I have been hosed ever since.
I guess the first thing to do is to get what ever data off it that I can
first...  I didn't think an application could cause this kind of carnage
in linux...

Is Knoppix live ok for this?  Something better?

Bruce