Fedora 17 "BIG CRASH"

[Heinz Diehl]

On 02.07.2012, Jim wrote: 

> I'm very concern about the /home partition that has some very important data
> that needs to be retrieved .
[....]

> My friend say the Data Has got to be SAVED.  If I can't do it he will have
> to take the hard drive out to someone that can.  I have talk him into using
> a /Backup hard drive on his new computer

Very important data should always be stored on a
backup-medium. Always. If your friend didn't, he/she will learn it
"the hard way", unfortunately. No hardware/software is "for shure", 
it's purely a matter of how important the data really are.

I would strongly advise you to stop all rescueing immediately, buy
another harddisk which is capable storing what's important, and
mirror that completely. If the data is readable, you can do that
e.g. using rsync: "rsync -avxHSAX /source/ /target". In all other
cases, "dd if=source of=target" will do it.