initialize ext3 disk by mistake
 

I'm not sure weather the drive I initialized:
http://i185.photobucket.com/albums/x...initialize.jpg
was ext3 or ntfs. I thought it was ntfs and that's why I clicked "ok". But now I'm not so sure. It shows up in drive manager as you can see from the link I provided. (since I clicked the ok button to this same dialogue once already)

On rare occasions in the past I've encountered this dialogue and I'm pretty sure I've clicked ok at least once and the system just recognized the drive it didn't format it or anything.

Searching windows forums for this hasn't provided much in the way of answers.

I've read conflicting post's, some say it formats the drive and others say it just makes it so the operating system can read it.

Does anyone know (for sure) what it does and what to do in a situation like this?

I can't see the drive (at all) in linux now, I've tried both f-disk -l and testdisk. With 3 physical drives attached I only see 2, (sda1 & sdb1) should be an sdc1 but there isn't.

Only thing I know to do now is try loading it up on windows and clicking "ok" to the initialize disk dialogue in drive manager.

drive obviously isn't dead, windows see's it, it's attached to the motherboard via sada port.
Robert Christ

Read this - are you sure you want that as (Windows) logical disk ?.

No, I am not sure weather it's a ext3 or windows logical disk. I tried to find this out using the fdisk -l command but no trace of the drive. Same with testdisk, doesn't even aknowledge the drive exist's. But windows sees it and I have tried an external usb cable and even attached it directly to my motherboard via a sata cable so I am pretty sure it's not a hardware failure.

And as I stated in the first post my suspicion is that I tried to initialize the disk in windows "drive manager" when in fact it was an ext3 partition.

I'm looking for a way to see it on my linux platform so I can decide how I am going to rescue the data.

Robert Christ

Attach the disk to your motherboard via SATA, check your BIOS and ensure no drive detection is masked, run your Linux distro, once its running type 'dmesg > /tmp/dmesg.log' as root. Then run 'cd /tmp; testdisk /debug /log /dev/sdc' (provided the disk doesn't appear as /dev/sda or /dev/sdb) as root, select the disk, select "none", analyze, quick search, deep search (if available) and quit. Now you have two logs to post (pastebin them): /tmp/dmesg.log and /tmp/testdisk.log. BTW a way to quickly determine if a disk has Windows-like content could be to grep for strings. This one-liner greps /dev/sdc for strings:
It stops after finding max 30 occurrences which should be enough to show if the disk does or does not hold a Windows partition.

Thanks, I'm out of town so it's going to be a day or two till I get around to it. Usually I can tell how the disk is formatted of course using fdisk -l. I'll post back after I've tried the things you mentioned.
Robert Christ

Never having used Windows Dynamic disks, but these sort of things (LVM e.g.) generally write meta-data all over the beginning of the extent. Which trashes the filesystem - at least.
Disk scrpaers (like that one unSpawn suggested) might be the only option. Linux has a few, but by nature they are slow, and require similar space to create the recovered files.
Could be ugly.

Well it looks like it was a simple mixup with cables which I find hard to believe cause I first started with a usb cable (type) controller and when I didn't see it there (in linux) I went straight to the motherboard which didn't work either.

But I just tried hooking it to my thermotake (drive dock) and it's working now. It's a linux partition and it's mountable and everything is good.

I tried it back on the motherboard again and that works too but I'm guessing I grabbed (by mistake) a cable that went to my esata bracket instead of one that went to the motherboard.

Thanks for all the suggestions

Robert Christ

Hard to believe but mix up you did. Anyway, good to see you got it back.