Data Recovery in a Nutshell

First: Grab an image

Do not operate on the problematic drive etc. directly, do an image first like in:

dd if=/dev/sdc1 of=sdc1-image

This assumes you have enough room left. If not buy a bigger drive, create a filesystem on it and do the image to this drive.

Notes:

This here assumes you have trainloads of free space, at least three times as much as the original filesystem had.
If you need a complete drive because the partitioning is gone as well, do it like
dd if=/dev/sdc of=sdc-image

For drives with read errors ddrescue is your friend, see the link above.

I had good results with foremost, however it apparently is better working on partitions than on raw images:

foremost -v -i sdc1-image -o sdc1-image-contents

It is part of Debian:

apt-get install foremost

(When I find the need)

Tino, 2011-04-11