Hey

I need some help w/ restoring an ext3 partition. So, this is what happened: given 1 ext3 partition for data and some other hdds; on one of these hdds there is a swap partition. I mess a bit with bios, the order of the hdds changed... reboot, and i find that the order is changed in linux too, data ext3 partition has a new life, as a swap partition.
I swore i would never use path is fstab again (only and only uuid and label), but forgot to change it on this server...
Good thing that "swapon -s" showed that it uses 0 byte on the given partition... bad thing is that it certainly overwritten the partition table

Im running "gpart -W /tmp/backup /dev/sda1" now... will this possibly help? Any other idea? mke2fs -S is my last remedy, i wound not want to use it just yet...

I would really appreciate any answer ^^'

EDIT
gpart result:
Checking partitions...
Ok.

Guessed primary partition table:
Primary partition(1)
type: 000(0x00)(unused)
size: 0mb #s(0) s(0-0)
chs: (0/0/0)-(0/0/0)d (0/0/0)-(0/0/0)r

Primary partition(2)
type: 000(0x00)(unused)
size: 0mb #s(0) s(0-0)
chs: (0/0/0)-(0/0/0)d (0/0/0)-(0/0/0)r

Primary partition(3)
type: 000(0x00)(unused)
size: 0mb #s(0) s(0-0)
chs: (0/0/0)-(0/0/0)d (0/0/0)-(0/0/0)r

Primary partition(4)
type: 000(0x00)(unused)
size: 0mb #s(0) s(0-0)
chs: (0/0/0)-(0/0/0)d (0/0/0)-(0/0/0)r

this sux.. thinkin' thinkin'...

You can try testdisk. It's worked for me before on something similar.

no luck, didnt find anything...
next step: mke2fs -S /dev/sda1 -> e2fsck /dev/sda1 ...

This isn't making a lot of sense - unless a mkswap was done somewhere along the way. The swap system will not mount a partition that doesn't have the correct "eyecatcher" that mkswap implants. If mkswap was done, it only write data into the first and eigth sectors IIRC.
gpart is for recovery of partitions, not data in partitions - similarly for testdisk, although the latter is better IMHO.

I just tested this - you might be lucky. I can get to all my files after mkswap, mkfs -S, fsck

Now that you point it out, i might have made a mkswap before i realized the order was changed.
fsck is running now, a bit slow (500gb)... and im getting a LOT of "Deleted inode XY has zero dtime. Fix<y>?"

okey, now im totally f*cked :P
i managed to restore ALL the files... into lost+found.......
i have like a thousand file with the inode no. ...
any tip for this situation?