Sounds like a disk label/partition issue or perhaps a bad superblock (depending on how these filesystems are accessed). I'd image the whole drive and then try to dope out the original geometry and make a new label. Failing that, scan for superblocks and try to reverse engineer a label/partition map from that. Failing that, scan the section containing the missing filesystem and look for stuff that appears to be file-like (text, JPEG, PDF, and similarly structured data). This only works well if the data is mostly contiguous (i.e. unfragmented). Note that I've written utilities to do all of these things on various systems, and my file recovery tools tend to outperform even expensive payware.
There appears to be a hardware problem as well, since 'dd' sometimes gets stuff and sometimes doesn't, and there are all those "drive not ready" console messages, but I'd appreciate the use of your Linux/ext2 tools if I do manage to image the drive.
This afternoon I'll try more experiments, including moving the drive to another computer in case the IDE controller is flaky. I powered it down overnight to cool off. (And to help me resist the temptation to stay up until dawn dicking around with it.)
Re: when a recently healthy drive suddenly disappears completely...
/dev/penis: no such device or addressSounds like a disk label/partition issue or perhaps a bad superblock
(depending on how these filesystems are accessed). I'd image the
whole drive and then try to dope out the original geometry and make
a new label. Failing that, scan for superblocks and try to reverse
engineer a label/partition map from that. Failing that, scan the
section containing the missing filesystem and look for stuff that
appears to be file-like (text, JPEG, PDF, and similarly structured
data). This only works well if the data is mostly contiguous (i.e.
unfragmented). Note that I've written utilities to do all of these
things on various systems, and my file recovery tools tend to
outperform even expensive payware.
Re: when a recently healthy drive suddenly disappears completely...
This afternoon I'll try more experiments, including moving the drive to another computer in case the IDE controller is flaky. I powered it down overnight to cool off. (And to help me resist the temptation to stay up until dawn dicking around with it.)