Ok I was meaning to change the file system on my 160 Gig usb drive using cfdisk. I tried it earlier in the day but for some reason it didn’t stick.

So in the after noon I booted up my windows pc with a live version of linux to try it again. I ran cfdisk looking at /dev/hda1. I got distracted by a phone call. When I came back I deleted /dev/hda1 thinking I was working on the 160 gig usb drive. As the partition was being written to the disk it dawned on me, what I had just done. CRAP!!!

At that point I shut every thing down and am now considering my options (if there are any).

Is there a way to recover from this???
Thanks
Clark

So, you want to recover a windows partition? NTFS I guess. EasyRecovery Pro does a good job of this.

http://www.ontrack.com/easyrecoveryprofessional/

You need to install windows on another drive, and put your fubar'd drive on a separate IDE chain. Then install the software and attempt a recovery of your data.

If it's just a partition issue, perhaps partition magic may help reassign the partitions without data loss- but I've never seen that happen. You are probably just SOL with the latter option though.

(c)fdisk should probably fix it - it's simply a matter getting the partition size(s) right in the partition table if no data has been over-written.

Better option would be testdisk - do a search for it here on LQ; gets good reports from those that have needed it.

Thanks every one for your help.

syg00

Testdisk did the trick!

Its nice when things go the way you want