Hi
I was using my mother and stepfather's computer when I booted into ubuntu linux 7.04 live cd.
I used fdisk to format my flash drive as ext3.
When I rebooted the computer the harddrive would not boot, windows setup says it is unpartitioned space.
They have lots of unbacked up files that I must recover.
Their old filesystem was ntfs.
Is it possible to recover their data?
I really do not want to have them lose their business plan etc.
Justin

P.S. Please hurry!

If it's really really important data, stop using the drive and take it to a professional and pay for the recovery. In any event, don't write to the disk at all or you'll possibly destroy data.

Otherwise, here are the steps I usually take:
1) boot a linux live CD (knoppix or system rescue CD are my choice) and make an image of the entire hard drive using dd onto another drive in my linux machine.

2) Run testdisk (which I think is on the Knoppix Live CD, and if not, probably on System Rescue CD) on the image, which may allow you to recreate the partition table. If this works, I usually then try running testdisk on the actual disk.

3) If you still can't mount and navigate the disk, run file recovery programs like PhotoRec and/or foremost on the drive image.

Usually testdisk does wonders on a drive that isn't damaged. On damaged drives, usually I end up getting a lot of photos and documents back with photorec and foremost.

Good Luck!

Start up your Ubuntu live cd again and download Photorec (tar.gz version) - it should be able to recover most of the data. The only things it can't recover well are large movie files. Make sure you have storage space for the output (obviously not the same disk/partition).

If this is *all* you did, you've got basically nothing to do.
Just go back and set the type back to NTFS (x'07').

If you actually did a mkfs as well, see the responses above.

Thank you so much!
My brother helped me get the BIOS to redetect the hardware,
then he loaded BartPE w/ photorec.
It has even found data from 3+ formats ago, amazing!
Thank you!
Now I have one problem left, the apology.