I’ve got my Linux back working.

I’ve reinstalled a fresh ArchLinux on my system, with a little regret that I couldn’t continue moving my system from one computer to another. pacman -Syu brought my computer up to date. It even works better that my previous installation.

The recovered data from the Linux partitions doesn’t look bright, meaning that there is much data scattered throughout numbered dirrectories, which is supposed to be correct data. I am finding bits and pieces every day, but I don’t know when this recovering process is going to be over.

I had 3 tar.gz files containing my home dir backup on one of the partitions of the damaged HDD. The archives had ~1GB each and I didn’t have where to put them, that’s why they remained on the HDD. Fortunately, I was able to recover one archive - the oldest one (December 2004). It is something. I managed to recover data files which, on the recovered files on the /home partion, appear to be zeroed files (copying a bad sectors results in putting zeros at the output).

Overall, a successful but lengthy operation, which still isn’t over.