OK, please don't laugh. I was working on partitioning space and in my stupid actions I accidentally did mkswap /dev/hda3... unfortunately /dev/hda3 is mounted at /. If any of you have done this before... it looks exactly like doing rm -rf / except it doesn't remove the files (but the effect is the same, anything in shared memory still runs for a while).

Now my system is completely crippled. I don't really care that is has to be rebuilt, but I would really like to get some files off of there. The reason I know those files aren't gone is because the mkswap /dev/hda3 command took so little time its impossible it deleted 200gB of data in 0.0001s. It seems like the partition table is messed up. Is there ANY way to do this from a recovery CD or any sort of partioning software?

THANKS for any help!

how do you know the system is useless now? what errors are displayed when you boot? i wouldnt think that doing mkswap would screw it up completely... you have to also exectue the swapon command for it to start being used as swap space, no?

anyway.. if there ARE errors on boot.. get a live cd and post the contents of /etc/fstab and /etc/lilo.conf (or whatever grub file if it uses grub).

those are my suggestions.
again, i wouldnt think it would screw it up but you said it did so..

According to man mkswap, the command turns an existing partition into swap space. As a minimum, that means the partition table is changed--this would not erase files, but it would stop you from seeing them. (MAYBE) all you have to do is just edit the partition table......

More when we see what fdisk -l says

Well can't say I've ever done this. But boot off a livecd or rescue cd if you have and use fdisk to change the partition type.

fdisk -l will show that /dev/hda3 is swap. So use do fdisk /dev/hda, then press "t" to change the type, then choose partition number 3, and select "L" to give you a list of partition types. Choose "linux" which is code "83".

Hope that helps and goodluck. It's hit and miss heh .