I just started setting up Gentoo on one of my computers which has had Windows XP on it for some time. I made all my partitions for linux and then set up the filesystems for each partition. Well, for some retarded reason I decided to make hda1 Ext2. So now my NTFS partition has an Ext2 filesystem. fdisk still recognizes the partition as NTFS, but of course Windows doesn't know what the hell to do with it. I'd like to know if I've erased or screwed up all the data on that partition, and if the data is still there how can I go back to an NTFS filesystem?

Maybe you could boot knoppix or some live cd, than, if it recognizes the HDD, copy the files to some other place, then partition hda1 as ntfs again and copy your windblows files back on to it. (NO GAURENTEES)
Hope that helps!

Even if I could get it to recognize the hard drive, all my other drives are full, so there would be no place to backup. Essentially, if there is no way to go from Ext2 to NTFS without destroying what is on the hard drive (if there is anything left), then I'm screwed. Thanks anyhow.

I think if you rewrite your partition table your data is lost.... cause before I changed one of my partition to swap and basically destoryed everything.....

That's what I figured. Oh well, no more windows for good now.

Did you simply change the ID of the partition using fdisk, or did you create a filesystem? If you did the latter, the files will be gone anyway. If you simply marked the partition as ext2, then marking the same partition as NTFS may fix the problem.

I created the filesystem, so everything must be gone. I pretty much assumed this was the case, but thanks for clearing things up.