Is it possible to mark a partition as being of type ext3, without
actually formatting it?

I have this question because, I ran into an interesting problem.

I dual boot RH 72 with 98. I used ext3 for RH.

Recently when I ran partition magic in 98, it said there was an
error in partitoining table or something like that. PMagic is naive
and doesnt yet understand ext3. It offered to fix the problem,
and I said yes. The result of which was that it market ext3
partition as unallocated. I wasn't sure what to do. When I
attempted to run Linux, it panicked. So I went back to partition
magic and market that ext3 area as a partition of type
'unformatted'. This time around, LInux ran just fine. But
when I run fdisk in linux, I see the root partition as being of
type FAT32.
Is there a way I can mark the root partition back to type ext3
without deleting it, or loosing data?

Thanks,
Ravi

yeah, just change it to type 83 in cfdisk or fdisk. easy and safe. i did it a few times, never a problem