harddrive crash... recovery?

Today I experienced a harddrive failure when my hda on my SuSE box decided it was time to give up...

I've got some backups, though they're ~ 2 weeks old, so I'm left with a slight problem since I've done a lot of changes during the last period (mainly to the etc dir, but that's lost anyway). The hard drive that crashed included my boot, etc, tmp, sbin, bin and other system dirs. On the other drives I got all user data such as home, var, use and opt. Which means I could still get to my most important data...
Though I first got to boot the system somehow...

So I'm thinking that I will put in a spare harddrive, install the base system, with either software to burn cd's (have to move one of my cd burners temporarily), or setup samba so that I can reach it from a w2k box with a cd burner. Either way I figure I just have to mount my other hard drives to make them available.
It's just that both ways seem to include a lot of extra work just to get to my wanted data...
I don't have another Linux box to use, just a FreeBSD box which I prefer to not touch. Sure, I can probably boot from a cd/floppy, but as I can't boot my system that seems kinda pointless...

So as I wait for my newly ordered hard drive to arrive, I'm just wondering if someone has another way of solving this...
Anyone?

//NoXcuz

yes. suse can boot a "rescue system" directly from cd. you should then be able to transfer via ftp or similar to your windows machine. (activate ftp service on you w2k machine)

another solution could be the suse "live cd" - a system that boots directly on cd-rom up into a full working x-windows

[edit]
i remember i read about a ext2fs-driver for windows, but i dunno where. maybe search on freshmeat / slashdot / google for this.
[/edit]

[another edit]
http://www.tecchannel.de/betriebssysteme/831/4.html for example (german page)
[/edit]

Thanks for the info. Didn't think about running the rescue system from cd at all...
But running a ftp service on windows? Scary thought...

I had a look at the EXT2 driver for Windows, and it seems cool. The problem is that I use ReiserFS extensively, so I can't retrieve all the information I want using that driver. I bookmarked it for future reference though.

Anyway, I think I'll just wait until I get my new hard drive and install everything onto just one drive. Then mount the others, retrieve what I want and then disconnect them. Coz the new hard drive is *a lot* bigger than I really need, and also bigger than the ones previously used. If I only can wait for the drive to arrive, that is...

The drawback is that the whole filesystem will be accessed thru one IDE channel, although UDMA100, but it might be a bottleneck... My current (broken) setup utilized several partitions on multiple disks so that reads/writes should be evenly distributed across the drives. Seemed to work fine until yesterday...

BTW, there doesn't seem to be any FTP install of SuSE8.0 available. Guess I'll have to buy it... Feels like I'm collecting those damn boxes with manuals, cds etc though. But I guess it's for a good cause, as they need the support...

//NoXcuz

>> Today I experienced a harddrive failure

I'm more interested in knowing the cause. Other than the hard drive itself the most common seen problems are:

1) Overheat
2) Using incorrect UDMA mode continuously

The hard drive was ~4 years old, so I'm pretty sure it was an age-thing, as the drive didn't support UDMA (the interface was ATA33 as well). I have extra fans in the case, but heat might also have something to do with it...

//NoXcuz