Learned my lesson - trying to avoid the consequences...

[Leagle]

Okay, so I'm back from vacation. Here's the reprise of my issue:

1) I had Amahi running on a one-hard-drive machine (you know where this is going), with a good amount of non-backed-up data on it
2) I intended to a) add disks; or b) back up the data on the server to an external drive; or c) backup to an on-line backup service
3) This being a pretty new machine (less than six months, all new components) I thought I'd be okay for a little while more (you definitely see where this is going)
4) Started getting some strange performance issues the day before I left for vacation last week; a kind Amahi forum user clued me in I might have a bad hard drive
5) Pressing ESC while booting up showed that I was getting some bad disk messages that were preventing the server from booting up

Conclusion: Hard drive going bad. Stressed out all during my vacation about likely having lost data.

Next steps on returning from vacation:
A) Yanked hard drive from Amahi server; bought new hard drive to hopefully copy whatever data I could recover to; installed both to Windows machine (d'oh!)
B) Eventually realized that I wouldn't be able to access the files on my old Amahi server hard drive from a Windows machine
C) Tried to use a Live USB version of Ubuntu (double d'oh!) to access the old server drive (i.e. booted my Windows machine with a USB Ubuntu flash drive)
D) Realized, after being able to see the partitions on my old server hard drive but not able to access or see any of my data, that I'm in way over my head, and that I'm in a hole and need to stop digging.

So, I'm trying to figure out what I should do -- I'm leery about messing around too much more with my old Amahi server hard drive, but I'd really like to recover whatever non-backed-up data I can. Any suggestions? Would I be able to use a Fedora USB flash drive to access my data? Is my data encrypted in some way so that no matter what version of Linux I'm using I wouldn't be able to get at it? As I said, I can see the partitions on it, but I can't get access to any files on the data section.

Any suggestions would be seriously welcome. Like, really, really, seriously welcome.

Thanks in advance.

[bigfoot65]

Check out this software, made for Windows to access Linux file systems.

http://b2yl.sl.pt

There is other software you can use or consider booting up a live CD and access the drive that way.

[Leagle]

Thanks; I'll give that a shot. I can't remember whether I selected/implemented any kind of encryption when I set up my machine; I wonder if that would have any effect. In any event, I'll take a run at it and see what happens...