fixing a box where the hard disc may failed

[Tim]

Hi,

I'm trying to rescue some data from a box where the hard disc *may* have
failed.  I had a few drive not ready notices, and needed to do fsck -y
to fix all the numerous errors it complained about when trying to just
do fsck, but then the problem originated from a wonky 4 pin power plug
on the drive.  So I don't know if the drive really failed, or it just
got contents scrambled.  If there really isn't anything wrong with the
drive, I might as well keep using it.  Are those "drive not ready"
messages always about real drive hardware faults?

Now, if I try to boot up normally, there's a lot of protests about not
being able to find the users needed by some services (root, named, and
so on...), nor any user.  So it looks like some important files got
borked, but I'm not sure what files are used for authentication, these
days.  The obvious password and group files looks okay.  Any clues on
this front?  I've got other very similarly set up boxes I could copy
files from.

This PC, unfortunately, I let set itself up with volumegroups, but my
other PCs I set up with ordinary ext3 partitions.  I could probably
stick the drive into another PC without too many problems.

If I boot up with init=/bin/sh on the end of the kernel line, the
computer does boot, and I seem to be able to read the data that I want
to save (mostly local webpages, and a few server configuration files).

-- 
(Currently running FC4, in case that's important to the thread)

Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.
I read messages from the public lists.