This is not a software problem!

To start a brave fight with the NY loneliness, I've decided to upgrade my old FC7 to the most recent 10-th version today and as a experienced Linux user, my first step was to backup everything useful I have -- data, configuration files, that were written by myself to avoid re-reading tons of documentations once again. That's always the good idea to make a backup before SW changes :)
In brief, my setup is like the following: 2 HD (one 200 GB IDE, second 500 GB SATA) attached to internal controller handled by pata_amd and sata_nv driver each. IDE HD contains mainly Windows and some data, SATA -- Linux and much data (music, video and etc), so my goal was to backup two partitions on the SATA drive with / and /home, just in case I'd forget smth and need to retrieve old data.
To make things clear, I'm working for a software company that produces a proprietary software for backup, so I used our software to achieve my goal. Run backup and left for a while. When I came back, I've seen a nice picture: completely stuck system with blinking num lock. kernel panic, I guessed:) Rebooted, set proper printk level and start backup one more in a clean shell (w/o involving X-server), haha, that's what I've seen a while later:

tried to change sata port the drive is attached to, play with BIOS options, driver parameters with no success :) Reading this with dd produces the same problem. For my luck I have silicon 3114 controller on the m/b, but in tries to set RAID mode by default, that makes me think that it could erase data on the attached hard drive, which is completely not what I want...
I currently see several options:
One is to purchase one more HD (anyway I do not have enough space to store all the data) and attach it to Silicon controller, install Fedora10 on it, then put old SATA to the same controller.
The second is to look for some external storage (SATA, USB2 or FW), transfer all the data to this storage, replace nvidia controller with silicon and reinstall Fedora.

Thinking....

mood: ...
music: Cathedral