hello, I just did a very silly mistake. I had some important data on one of my partitions of the hard disk and by mistake I just delete the partition...Here is what I did exactly:

mount /dev/hda7 /mnt/test
rm -rf /mnt/test

Please help me. I need to recover the data. I am using a Debian system.

if you use ext2, you can recover your data with the command "recover /dev/hda?". If you use a ext3 you are in a big problem.

Yes I am using ext3..... does anyone knows about some propritary software which can help me?

I ran "apt-cache search recover" and that returned a list of applications of which "e2undel" and "recover" seem to be useful for recovering data from ext2 filesystems and "testdisk" might be another useful program. Try "apt-cacche show e2undel", "apt-cache show recover" and "apt-cache show testdisk" to see if any of these utilities seem to fit for your purposes.

I have never myself tried to recover deleted data, so I don't know if this is possible or not. A google search for "recovering data" (maybe added with "Linux") or something similar might produce more useful information on the subject.

You should always backup all your important data. There's a new graphical backup utility, called "sbackup", available in testing and unstable, plus several command line backup tools.

Thanks for your valuable suggestions. I appreciate it.

I will try to test those tools which you suggested. But if anyone else has any kind of first hand experience please let me know....

WEll none of the tools available over the Internet which claims to recover data even from ext3 partitions work. Never ever use them if you happen to end up in situation like me (look the first post).

Guess I will never be able to recover my data. I should have been more careful.

I dont think iyou can get any of the info back... but I do want to know something...

How do you accidentally type a pretty specific command into the shell?

rm -rf /mnt/test

Seems this would be a very very rare thing to type exactly that on accident...

well I thought that my drive was not mounted so I wanted to clear the /mnt directory and after hitting that I realized that I had actually mounted it. It was a sheer ignorance.

There are tons of programs that can recover deleted data from hard drives, but as far as I know none of them are free or open-source, and I don't know how many would work with Linux. But I'm sure that it is possible, just as I'm sure that it's expensive, to do. If you took your data to a place that specializes in these things, they would do it for you, and probably charge a few hundred bucks.

Really??? can you please tell me if there is any commercial software which can do this thing. I have tried 4-5 evaluation version which are available but none of them even showed me the files(to be recovered, forget saving the files on another harddrive(which they claim to be available in full version))....I don;t mind spending few extra bucks to get my data back if I know for sure shot that the software will work.

thanks