[nflug] attempting data recovery (after total screwup)

[Stephen Burke]

Hello all,

I guess maybe this might be a lesson in NOT doing things before being 
fully awake, but I screwed things up majorly here this morning and I'm 
not quite sure if I can recover or not.

I have this machine with 2 200G drives in it. The first, with the system 
on it is the removable variety and the second was for dumping data onto 
that I wanted to be able to use from whichever system was running on the 
first. (mostly ext3 and some fat32 and ext3 -since the main system here 
is dualbooted 'nix and xp -with a swap area in the middle)

Since I had a free drive to pop ino the first hd slot, I thought I would 
attempt to install slackware 11 on it since I haven't yet really dabbled 
in the slack realm.

SO, after using fdisk to set up new partitions on the slack disk, I 
started merrily running through the install options, thinking that since 
I had just set up /dev/hda in fdisk that that's where slack would assume 
it was supposed to go. So I hit "ok", not reading closely enough to see 
that it was asking to format hdb3 instead of hda3.

I noticed after a couple of seconds that it was hitting hdb and killed 
it, but not, apparently, before it deleted the journal (was ext3) and 
presumably quite a bit of other crucial information.

Then, trying to recover things, I booted up the main OS here which 
naturally started complaining when it hit that data partition. So I ran 
fsck there, which of course complained even more when everything was out 
of whack. That was followed by all sorts of clearing of broken inodes 
and fixing of stuff, which I answered yes to all of, hoping that things 
might be put straight by that. There was alot of talk  of moving things 
to "lost+found" during that where once again I hit <y> for everything, 
once again, full of futile hope.

Everything boots fine, now, but when I look at that partition I see 
absolutely nothing. and when I look at the properties window I see "5.4 
GB out of 9.8 GB (46% used)" when actually the partition should be 121.5 GB.

My question now is: since I killed the format before it went too far, is 
there any hope of recovering any of the data that WAS there, or did I 
screw it up further by letting fsck "fix" and "clear" everything?

Any particular data recovery tools that I might look into, or is now a 
"fait accompli" and I just have to resign myself to paying the price for 
being a bonehead?

Any advice at all is most welcome at this point, if only how to recover 
the 100+ GB of new space where I might put other stuff.

Thanks,
S.

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