Hi all,

I was trying to install Fedora the other day, and I forgot to disconnect my external 320GB HD with all my data on. I think I've repartitioned the external disk (sdb) instead of the 500GB internal one (sda). Fedora couldn't cope with my ancient monitor so I reinstalled Mandriva (with the external disk disconnected)... Now when I connect the external disk it sees only 8.4GB with a Lost+found folder in, and my personal data appears to have gone forever.

I gather that the data is still there, but I need to reconstruct indexes or tables or something in order to access it again. Can anyone help a poor clueless Linux hopeful recover all his years of effort?
Many thanks,
Hagbag69

I haven't a clue how to rebuild a partition table, so my only suggestion is to use a live linux cd of some sort and see what data you can get off the disk. It is very likely that you overwrote at least 8gigs of it, and depending on whether or not you did a complete reformat when installing Mandriva, your other data may be gone also. If you did a quick format, then all of the data is still there, minus the partition information, and of course whatever was overwritten by the install.

Manually recreating a partition table is pretty low level stuff, and the software that is available (which may not even work) is expensive. Regardless, my advice would be to get whatever information off that disk that you can before doing anything else.

Sorry , No experience either on this , but I can give you this Link to the "Ultimate Boot CD" (it's Free ) on it you will find three "Hard Disk Low-Level Editing Tools" , how they work I haven't the first foggiest. Also on this page Here is a number of rescue disks for you to look over if you want.(all free but the two with the $ beside them)
hopefully you can recover your data.