I hosed my / partition!!!

[Kimball Larsen]

 Ok.. I'm dumb.. here's the reader's digest version of my story thus far:

A kind soul gave me a 20 GB hard drive for my laptop today - since this is much bigger than my 6GB that was in my powerbook, I wasted no time in getting the new one installed... I got the drive at work, where I just put the powerbook to sleep every day before I leave, and then wake it up at home... but in my exuberance to install the new drive as soon as I got home, I forgot that the darn thing was sleeping and I swapped the drives... as I put the keyboard back on with the new drive installed, I bumped one of the keys, and it woke up... I suddenly realized my error and got a very sickening feeling..... 

Needless to say, things have been going downhill from there.. I quickly put the thing back to sleep, and then swapped the drives again, and woke it back up .. the system reappeared as it should, so I quickly tried to shut it down.. well, as you may be able to guess, by now the kernel was completely confused because of the sudden file system disappearance and reappearance that it just saw, so it puked, and locked up as I tried to shut down (the first time I have ever had any problems with linux locking up on me... )

So I reset the machine, and tried to reboot... the friendly boot menu of yaboot still greets me (so that partition is ok), but when I hit the l key for linux, and it tells me it is trying to load the kernel, suddenly it stops, telling me that the device has either a corrupted or otherwise damaged file system...

I can't boot linux!  Arghh!

Ok, to my credit, I made a backup of the whole system about 2 weeks back, so its not the end of the world if the partition is just completely gone - but I would really like to get it back... there is some data on there (code I've written in the last 2 weeks) that I really don't want to loose..

Here is what I have tried so far:

Booting with the YellowDog 2.2 installer CD to attempt to view the partition... fdisk tells me that my partition is still there, and still the right type, but the installer won't mount it.. it says that /dev/hda12 doesn't exist.. and in the list of partitions that the partitioning part of the graphical install /dev/hda12 is just left out altogether...

I looked for but was unable to find fsck on the YellowDog installer cd...

Then I went to Debian's installer CD to see if that would give me any better luck.. nope.. same result..no fsck, no rescue option, and the fdisk utility on it reports the same as on the yellowdog cd... it says the partition is there and still ext2...

So, what else can I try?

Any suggestions?

Would dd work if I can get this drive attached to another machine?

Thanks!

-Kimball Larsen