Subj : Help! Accidentally deleted linux partition
To   : comp.os.linux
From : oliver.s
Date : Tue Aug 31 2004 09:31 am

Hello,
About five months ago I installed RH linux 9 onto a laptop dual
booting with Windows XP, using some third party partitioning software
that could non-destructively resize NTFS partitions.  This worked
fine.  However, after a little while, I thought it might be nice to
create a FAT32 partition both OS' could use.  I resized the XP
partition again, and this worked, but when I tried to create the FAT32
partion - you can probably guess what happened next - I deleted the
linux root partition instead, and (laugh if you want to) I have no
backup.

The whole process of deleting the partition took less than a second
(it didn't format it or anything) so i'm guessing the data is still
there, but when I try loading linux, it stops with the message 'could
not find init, try passing init= as a kernal argument' or something
like that, and refuses to load (it does start to boot OK though - the
/boot partition was untouched.)

After googling around a little while, I found some similar cases where
people had deleted partitions and recovered them again, but I am not
sure what (specifically) to do, or what tools I would need to recover
an ext3 partition from Win XP.

Any suggestions of (free and downloadable) software I could use? It
also had some rather important coursework (amongst other things) that
would not be too great to lose on it, so I would really appreciate any
help.

You might also want to email me: oliver.s@bk.ru

Oliver

.