looking for linux experts, part 2

[dominic bonfiglio]

Hello, I am the poor soul with the hard drive problems. 

Taking the advice of a fellow (more experienced) list member, I am sending
out a second message with some more detailed information about my problem
and the kind of help I hope to get for it. 

THE PROBLEM:

I shutdown my computer normally on Friday night. On Saturday when I booted
the computer everything seemed normal. I got to the graphic login mask and
started my session, like usual. Then I noticed that the hard drive was
making strange noises, as if it were stuck at some point. The KDE graphic
interface wasn't loading--or at least so it seemed. After about five
minutes, I realized that KDE *was* loading, but just at a snail's pace.
After fifteen minutes, my desktop had appeared. Everything seemed normal,
except when I saved or opened a file from the hard disk, at which point the
strange noises would begin again and I would have to wait three or four
times as long as usual for the loading and saving to take place. 

I called my Linux administrator consultant friend in Germany. He had me boot
with the SuSe 9.3 DVD in rescue mode. He tried to do a reiserfsck
--fix-fixable, etc. It didn't work so we tried to rebuild the tree. We found
30 bad blocks, saved them in a vi file, and rebuilt the tree again, this
time skipping the bad blocks. It worked and the computer indicated that the
dev/hda was without inconsistencies. But when I tried to boot normally, I
was automatically put in a maintenance mode and there were once again
unclean files and the dma was still off. So I called my friend and we tried
to clean up the fsck.ext2, but we got a segmentation error. Now it will only
boot from the SuSe disk. From the rescue mode, we determined that my data on
the hda is still there and, apparently, undamaged. Now I need to get the
data off, replace the hard disk, and put it back on.   

WHAT KIND OF HELP DO I NEED:
I need somebody with an external hard drive to save my data and who can then
help me partition a new hard disk and reinstall SuSe9.3 and my old data from
the external hard drive. 

HOW FAST I NEED IT:  

The sooner the better, although I could hold out a week. 

WHERE I AM LOCATED, WHERE I WILL TRAVEL:

I live in central Toronto, but I am also willing to travel to whoever can
help.

COMPENSATION
I can offer compensation for someone with expertise. On the other hand, as a
PhD student, I am also happy to encourage the goodwill ethos of the open
source community. 

Thanks again to you all...
Dominic

 

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