Filesystems, Disks and Memory

I accidentally deleted one of my ext3 partitions from Windows XP. However, since I did not make new partitions over it, or format that area, I guess my data is safe. So I made a new partition with the same cylinder boundary values using fdisk (in Linux). But I cannot access my old data on that partition [on Linux I'm not able to mount it]. How do i recover my data? (the data is important to me) Pls help.

[Here's how I lost my partition, if that info will be of any use. I use a control panel extension called IFS Drives in WinXP to access my ext3 partitions. I used the Hard disk management on Windows to delete a FAT
partition, without unmounting my ext3 partitions. After deleting the FAT
partition, one of my ext3 partitions was gone too! I tried changing the partition type id of the newly salvaged partition to 7 (which is the ID of NTFS partitions) to see whether I could access the partition on Windows at least that way. But then Windows says the partition is unformatted, and asks me whether I want to partition it.]

Thanks in advance.
Dany.

Sorry, based on your description, I don't think you can easily recover.

Hi.

Depending on how valuable your data is, you might want to try the utility below. Several postings elsewhere claim to have had success with recovering deleted partitions. I don't know if your additional actions have made that impossible. It will likely be impossible if you did format the new partition.

Back up your data, and try it if you cannot recreate the data that was destroyed -- what do you have to lose, except some time?

The backup is important in case something else goes wrong (and, in any event, you will likely now do backups as a matter of course).

Best wishes, good luck, let us know whether it was a success or a failure ... cheers, drl

TestDisk - CGSecurity

And remember, you can mount an ext3 partition as ext2, so don't worry about ext3, just try to recover ext2.