Hi,
Please help me. today I tryed to mount my external hard drive in fedora bud i couldn't. I found a solution from this website. I did this command "mkfs.ext3 /dev/hdb1".
Now I cannot see my external hard drive in windows. What should I do? I have a lot of important data on it.
Thanks

I hate to be the bearer of bad news but that command formats the hard drive with the ext3 file system, removing all data on it. There's a possibility you could use a data recovery program to get your files back if you've not done much else, but I would be getting used to the idea that the data is gone.

how can I see my hard drive in windows.....I want to try to recover my data (((

You may be able to use something like Photorec, though I have never used it so cannot vouch for its effectiveness:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photorec
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/File_...ed_By_PhotoRec
However, as I said, you do need to be prepared to face the possibility that some or all of your data is lost. Now is, sadly, too late to make that backup you should have of any data you care about.

What distribution/version are you running?

/dev/hdb1 references an internal IDE/PATA drive connected to the 1st controller as a slave. Any external drive should be something like /dev/sdb1. I assume what you posted was a typo.

testdisk and photorec are two utilities that can be useful in recovering lost data.

Thanks alot.
I used Recovermyfile. it is scanning for about 16 hours and I estimate it will last till tomorrow. I hope that my files will be recoverd because i can see some of them in this software now.

I would suggest learning what the different commands that can manipulate disk drives do before following any guide online. This will save you from problems such as this. A couple to watch out with are dd and rm. Back in the mid 90's when I was new to Linux and I had just finished installing Slackware, I type this command in while as root: 'rm *'. I ended up kissing my Slackware install good bye and ended up installing again. I did learn to have a healthy respect for that command after that. Another thing I would recommend doing is keep a backup of anything that is important.

Edit:
If the disk had NTFS on it originally but your Linux kernel does not have support for it built in then, you would not be able to mount it under Linux. In which case you'd need to compile your own kernel, configuring in NTFS. As for Windows, don't expect it to mount any Linux file systems at all.

we still do not know what OS was used
/dev/hd???
is still used in RHEL5
but RHEL6 is using sd for BOTH

if this was say fedora 19
then that hd location would be useless and nothing would have been wrote

You most certainly should not run commands if you do not know what they do!! OUCH! To answer some other questions you had, if it was recognized by Windows originaly it is probably NTFS or Fat, or WAS one of those. If they are not recognized in your Linux OS version, you need some components set up for that file system.

As far as formatting it to the ext3 "mkfs.ext3", ext3 is a Linux format, and will only be recognized by Windows if you install special tools to read the drive. Overall, if you intend to use the drive on both Windows and Linux, you should not only choose NTFS, but install the components into your Linux system for the NTFS as well.

Or, you could shun any Windows machines and convert completely to Linux formats! : )