Hi all,

I have done something bad, very bad

I was trying to format a removable flash drive and serched e-net to find out how it's done in Linux. I eventualy found that it could be done with mkfs.vfat /dev/sda1 but when typing in the console I have made a typo (or so I think now cos back then everything seemed fine) I pressed enter and process started, but then exited almost instantly (in overal it was less then a second I think). I thought nothing of it since I thought that nothig happend and didn't try anything elese, but gave up on trying and resumed my regular daly activities. Evrything workd fine. After three hours or so I have finaly shut my laptop down and went to have dinner. Gustt what - after I came back and turned laptop back on it have told me that there is no filesystem there. I booted from suse installation cd, went into the resque mode and typed fdisk -l it tells me that my disk is free and clear. Nothing on it.

Is there anything that can be done to restore my hard drive? Or at least to save my files?

Thank you all for your help.

it-s

I would reccomend booting with a knoppix disk and running gpart, which is a partition guessing program. The program may take quite a while depending how big your disk is, but it basically scans your disk and tries to guess what the partitions were.

If you don't have a copy of knoppix (which should come with gpart on it), then boot with any other live cd and download the binary from the website and run that.

Thanks for your advice Archangel-13, but that is the very first thing I did - started up with my suse 10 DVD in recovery mode and run gpart, but all it could find was one partition it identified as ext2 and I don't have any ext2 partitions. I only had one reizerfs, two ext3 and a swap. So it didn't work. :<

Any other recommendations?

Thanks

Well, I've never needed anything further that gpart, but I have heard some good things about Tiramisu Data Recovery, though I've never used it.

The only other thing I could recommend probably wouldn't be of much help. If you know what the partition sizes are/were then you could manually recreate them. I've gotten in to the habit of keeping a copy of my partition table on a seperate disk just so when I do mess up my system I can manually reset the partition sizes and then mount them.

Good luck.

Thank you Archangel-13 for all your help with this issue. I have managed to fix my hard drive and to think of it it only took me 1 hour to do so.

Here is what I did:
After a whole day of tries and falures with different data recovery software I have accidently found a small freeware linux program which if you need it can be found here >>> http://www.cgsecurity.org/index.html?testdisk.html <<<
This small yet wonderfull utility restored all my lost partitions in ony a few minuts. Moreover all the formats and boundries were guessed right! All I had to do afterwards was to boot up with my SUSE installation DVD and run system restore.

That's all there was

As far as I can tell all my data is perfictly safe and my system works just as if nothing has ever happend.

Now I'm off to send money to the guy who made this utility.

Best wishes

it-s