I need your help.
Yesterday I tried to install Windows XP on my hard drive, and it complained and wouldn't do it. When I booted back in to Windows I found that my 62GB logical ext3 partition with all my important files on had gone. I'd had a similar problem with a friend's computer before and I managed to fix it using all the useful information available on the internet, so I opened up GParted (should have used the command line ...) and created a partition approximately where the other would have been, but forgot that by default, GParted automatically formats the partition. So the partition has a ext2 filesystem written over it. Is the data still recoverable? No files were saved to the new partition, and it is unmounted. When a partition is formatted, is data just written at the beginning of the partition or al the way through? I know ext3 is just ext2 with journalling. Can anyone help me please?
I've Googled and searched the forums, but haven't been able to find any info on my specific situation.
This is on a laptop with partition layout as follows:
1 ext3 10GB Debian
2 swap 1GB
3 hfs+ 6GB Mac OSX x86
4 extended 83GB
Unformatted 19GB
5 ext3 62GB files (DELETED)
6 Unformatted 2GB (reserved for suspend to disk)

maybe you can look at this program

You said it wouldn't install, so how did you "boot back in to Windows?"

I can't say you're wrong but I find it difficult to believe that gparted formats partitions by default. That sounds like it would make a lot of very unhappy people.

Probably not, if it was really reformatted. Try mounting it r/o from your Debian system or a linux live CD like Kanotix, Slax, or other and see if you can read it.

Where is Windows on this list? You say you rebooted into Windows, but it's not on this list.

What would be better is the output from fdisk -l instead of what you have here, because stuff like (DELETED) doesn't tell us anything.

i dident know they made laptops with 183gb hard drives.

if the parttion was just removed and not formatted persay then you could just recreate the parttion with the same begining byte count and end byte count.


then mount it to recover data.

I do this alot when resizeing parttions with no data loss.

This of course if you remeber where the parttion started at

Don't like your chances for a simple recovery - the mke2fs will probably have used the same set of superblocks (BTW, I'm quite prepared to believe gparted would do this - expect it to in fact. That's why the GUIs are invented - to save people having to know what to do {next}).
Testdisk is designed for recovery after partition deletion - different issue.
Best bet might be to try some forensic software - I've seen good reports about foremost (on sourceforge), although I haven't tried it myself.
(exvor do the maths again - you've "double counted" the extended/logicals)