Help!! Lost my data
 

I installed Vector last night over an existing Vector installation on sda6. I have my data files on sda8. and sda7 is the swap.

Anyway, i went to access sda8 today and its empty!!!
I tried umounting and remounting, different distro (ubuntu), even booted up Windows, but its gone!!!

How can I get it back???

It's still seen as a vfat file system in parted...
:eek:

A) Take /dev/sda7 off-line. Comment out the line in /etc/fstab. If it is being used for a directory needed for the system, set up that directory somewhere else.
B) Double check that the data isn't in another partition. If you have a different number of partitions, then /dev/hda8 may be referring to a different partition.
C) Try to google for an unformat utility that supports the filesystem that used to exist on the drive. If you can't find one, then download the first install disk for SuSE 9.3. It has an unformat recovery option that may work, provided that this partition doesn't start on a different cylinder now. You could explore a SuSE 9.3 repository. Maybe the utility that does the recovery can be found and downloaded, rather than downloading and burning the entire 1st disk image.
D) If you can't recover the entire partition, perhaps you could use an undelete utility for either linux or utilities.
Individual files may be able to be recovered.
E) If none of the above work, you could try forensic techniques to recover parts of files. For example, you could make an image of the hard drive using the "dd" command and back it up. Using a tool which can examine the raw contents (usually in hex) may help recover files. For this you need to understand how the filesystem works. Another example is using grep to try to locate a pattern on the raw device or image backup. This works best for files of text.

What is vector? what is its funtion?

/dev/sda8 is a serial device, 8th partition. Please make sure the system hasnt started refering to the device in question as sdb or something similar first. a list of /dev | grep sd will list all serial devices and partitions.

If its a vfat filesystem, you need a backup of the FAT table to restore it. Look for anything that has backed up the first Megabyte of your hard disk.
Chance is that you will loose a lot, but some will be saved.

Also try this ($ is the prompt):
$dd if=/dev/sda8 of=/dev/stdout

This will output the raw device content to the terminal. It will let you see if the device has been formated in any way, but I doubt you can recover any files unless you put a lot of work into it.

I assume that Vector is the name of the distribution. /dev/sdX indicates a scsi or sata drive. These are block devices.