Bad sector on a directory

Question

I've a bad sector on my /home/xyz which make a folder with 10 GB data unreadable. As far as I can see in syslog there's only one badsector with may destruct 4K of data while I have no access to 10 GB of it's inner data, Any suggestion on how to recover the data inside it?

Answer 1

1. Make a full backup of volume with dd: # dd if=/dev/your/volume of=/path/to/img.dd bs=4k
2. Create a lo-device from dd image: # losetup /dev/loop0 /path/to/img.dd
3. Use e2fsck to check filesystem: # e2fsck -y -v /dev/loop0

Answer 2

You might want to try to use the GRC Spinrite on the disk, it might be able to recover the sector so that you could recover the files on the broken directory.

Answer 3

Bad blocks means the disk is dying. Turn off, replace ASAP.

fsck(8) should gather files floating around unlinked into lost+found, looking at them with file(1) and assorted programs handling the different formats you'll come across should help identifying most of them.