I had a 30GB partition containing a Reiser file system and about 27GB of data---mostly videos and Linux iso's. In a classically Dumb Move I clicked on the wrong block in DiskDrake and reformatted the whole partition (with Reiser again). I would dearly love to undo that reformat but none of my searches for unformat techniques has led to anything for Linux---many hits for Windows but none for Linux.

Can anyone suggest a method or at least a place to look for a method?

Point your browser at www.google.com/linux; search for 'reiserfs unformat'. I got 172 hits.

Bigrigdriver: Many thanks for your prompt and helpful reply. I especially appreciate that you did not point out that you were pointing out the obvious. Your post was just what I needed.

I am not having a good day. I seem to have let the grief of this loss cloud my judgement. I did turn to google first but I neglected to specify "reiserfs" so I got many thousands of hits, mostly about Windows, and I gave up before I got to any about Linux. It appears that "google/linux" doesn't restrict the hits to Linux.

But when I specified "reiserfs unformat" I got fewer than 1000 hits and in the first 100 there were three references to reiserfsck. Then I did something right, to set a precedent: I dd'ed hda8, the damaged partition, into hda7, an empty partition of the same size, and tried reiserfsck. It failed. Only then did I notice that hda7 had a fat32 fs. So I reformatted hda7 to ext3, like hda8, and now I'm waiting for dd to complete. Wish me luck.