[SASAG] recovering a filesystem from unwise use of fdisk

[shades2]

James Affeld wrote:
> I have/had an external drive with data on an ext3 filesystem.
>
> I attached it to a box I was going to install FreeBSD 7.0, so it would get discovered.  It did.  I didn't notice that the primary HD did not.  So I accidentally repartitioned the external device. I did not write any data to it, nor format it.
>
> I've changed the disk system type back to Linux, but I can't mount it.  
>
>    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
> /dev/sdb1   *           1       60801   488384001   83  Linux
>
> #from dmesg
> [12527.051393] VFS: Can't find ext3 filesystem on dev sdb1.
>
> Any suggestions? 
>
>
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Hi James,

Perhaps the first step if possible is to image the drive to another 
drive, just in case. You obviously do NOT want to write to that disk or 
data loss will occur.

I've had good experiences recovering data using Stellar Phoenix before 
for file recovery, albiet not the Linux version, but it should do the 
trick for you.
It is a commercial product, about $149 USD for the commercial version. I 
recovered about $10 million dollars worth of deleted drilling data once from
a laptop (don't ask...).

http://www.stellarinfo.com/linux-data-recovery.htm
http://stellarinfo.com/esupport/users/kb.php?id=10122&category_id=11&sid2=

The other option is Photorec. In fact there are a number of programs 
under Linux for recovery under ext2 / ext3

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

Good luck.

Cheers, Mike.