PARTITION TABLE TOASTED - NEED help recovering data!!!
 

Long story really short - this involves a windoze install on a new 2nd hardrive!!!

OK! Stop laughing! Imagine me crying right now!

I just bought a second harddrive so I could safely keep windoze segregated from my SuSE 9.0 distro on HDA. I even did a backup of /home to a separate partition I keep for backups only. Unfortunately I didn't burn cd's of it this time. I knew better. Every time I get mixed up with mickeysoft, it's usually very painful!

I created a new partition on HDB for the windows install, but it didn't like that one, and proceeded to rewrite the partition table on HDA prior to install. The new partition table took the first 13-14MB of HDA (which includes /boot, swap, and part of /) and left the remainder unallocated and unformatted.

Here's where I may have really screwed up: I didn't have the specific number of cylinders recorded for each of my old partitions, just size in MB and GB. I created a new primary partition on HDA slightly larger than my old 'backup' partition (It was the last partition on HDA, so I worked backward). I wasn't able to mount this partition, so I used reiserfsck. I was told that I had a bad superblock and to do --rebuild-sb. No luck! Told to use --rebuild-sb --no-journal-available. Still no luck!

I thought I'd better stop there before I really toast the data, If I haven't already done that.

My last hard backup was 4/30, so I've got 2 months worth of files from 3 users that disappear if I can't recover.

PLEASE HELP!!!

Bernd

-I'm doing a dd_rescue of this new (hopefully old) partition, to a file in
/home on HDB, in hopes of being able to recover it, and prevent any more of my recovery attemps from messing with this data. Never used it before, so I'm not too sure of what I will find.