Need to recover data from External Usb Disk
 

hi,
I have really shot myself in the foot here. I have a 350 GB external USB drive that i use mostly as a media server and also as my backup drive. It had 4 partitions 3 NTFS partitions and one Linux etx3 partition. The linux partition is the one with backup of most of my important files.


I was accessing this Drive from my mac (newly acquired) and i used the Mac Disk Utility to erase one of the partitions (it was shown as a Ntfs-3g partition, though i selected Mac extended as the format, thinking this will erase the partition and format it to mac file system). This killed the disk.

I tried accessing the disk from my Linux (Fedora 9) and i cannot see any of the partitions (i tried using fdisk. It just says sdb has no recognized filesystem).
I just want to ask if there is any way i can access /recover the data on my Linux parition? I think the partition table has been messed up. Is there some linux application that can go through that disk and recover the ext3 partition? It has all my backups and would be a pain to loose that :(.
Thank you for your help and please, any help is greatly appreciated.

Caveat: I know nothing of macs.
If you want to scan the disk and look for the partitions themselves, try testdisk. If you have previously deleted (other) partitions, it may find them as well. Will be your decision what to recover.

Hi,

Yes, 'Test-Disk' would be a good place to start. You could look at other diagnostic tools within the 'Slackware-Links' .
More than just Slackware® links!

I have downloaded testdisk and am running it now. Initially it located the whole disk as a single FAT 32 partition. I have selected the "look deeper/search deeper" option. Hope this works out. I will update this thread once this finishes running.

Thanks for the suggestions so far. Hope this works out.

Thanks a lot everyone for your suggestion. I worked pretty well and i finally have access to my data again. Thanks a lot.