how to recover lost partions as it is
 

hi friends i have got a strange problem yesterday. hope anybody have solution for this.

before yesterday i have fedora8, slackware12 and solaris express developer edition 72 build installed in my system. my 320 gb harddisk is partitioned as 3 primary partition one extended. in extended partition i have 6 different partition including one ext3 for fedora, one swap for fedora, 2 ntfs, and two fat32 partitions.
fedora is in first logical partition.
slackware is in first primary partition.
and solaris is in second primary partition.

now problem arrise when i have to install windows.
while tring to install windows in my pc there are some wired things
1. window says partion table is not in order
2. my first partition is unknown to windows as it should be (where slackware is installed). so i have to format the partition. i do that format it with fat file system & install windows in it.
3. after installing windows my windows drive was not c drive but l drive .
4. till now every thing is fine as till now i have not loaded grub in it . but i cant access my fedora & solaris.
5. next step i have done is i try to remove my swap partition as it is not used usually as i have 2 gb of ram & needed some free space out of my hard drive.
so i open disk manager in windows right click in swap partition & click on delete logical drive.....



hey my all logical drives are removed except fedora partition it was as it is. it is showing me 200 gb of free space instead of my five logical drives.
i am guessing that my partition table is corrupted as data is there at that place of my hard drive as it is i want to recover it. i dont like recovering one by one as all 200 gb is important to me & i cant recover that one by one & i have no place to put that recovered files.


is there any method to recover mean can i recover my partition table as in previous state.

hope a reply soon.....
thanks in advance if u make a reply to me

Testdisk - should be on any recovery CD; I use Knoppix, but systemrescueCD should have it too.

The partition table not being in order is not a problem as far as I know.
To get the boot selector back you have to re-install grub. You can do that from any live-cd. There are tons of tutorials on the web, you should find something useful.

If you boot up with a live-cd and do "fdisk -l" as root - what does it say?
You can fix a broken partition table rather easily with gpart, if that's really the problem.

i dont want to get back the boot selector.
i know i can reinstall grub but i actually wanted to get my data back & dont wanna to recover it file by file.
after doing fdisk -ls
it shows me only partitions which are not merged in free space means three of my primary partition & one fedora partition rest all is free space.

thanks for reply but this thing i have tried. plz any more suggestions.

i have not tried testdisk yet.
i am going to give it a try today.
thanks for suggestion.