Hello all, I was tempted to start a Thread "IDIOT" but wasn't sure that it was appropriate. I certainly feel like one since yesterday. A friend came over with a Fedora 10 DVD which he had trouble installing. So I attached another Hard Disk to my Windows machine, inserted the DVD and said "GO". I never looked at the size, when Fedora asked if I wanted it formatted, and I had forgotten to disconnect my 250GB external USB drive. It had an NTFS file system, and now it says Type 8E. Is there any way to reverse the "Format"? Thanks for looking. Werner

If all it really did was change the type, you can use fdisk to put it back, you should get most of your data back. Otherwise you can try eg photorec to trawl for data, but on a disk that size it'd be tedious.

8E is ext2/3 if I recall correctly.

You told it to format; it formatted. Most probably it just rewrote the header block (and the copies of that block) on the partition, so it is likely most of your data still exists.

I would image the drive before doing anything else. Then I would try reformatting it as NTFS. This should give you a blank NTFS system, but you then can try various Windows recovery tools to get your data back. Might work, might not.

Thanks Chris and Jiml8, I have got it sorted. It took a while though. I deleted both Linux partitions, created one NTFS partition. Then used Ontrack Easy Recovery and got 38000 files back. Just too easy, but I think I will be more careful in future.
Werner