[SOLVED] Recovering Lost Partition

[Cool01]

I have just upgraded from OpenSuSE 10.2 to 10.3 on my main Linux box and I ran into a problem.

I had one particularly big partition which was mounted like this:

"/home/workaccount/bigpartition"

I tried to back it up and had problems. I did not have time to solve the problem properly (it had to do with a usb hard drive) and so I backed up most of it. The data is not critical, but I it will be hard to replace because, well, there was so much of it.

Unfortunately, I decided to change my partition order, so I could not rebuild the disc without formatting the partitions. However, this particular partition was the last one on the drive and I know the start and end cylinders, and I made sure that I did not use that part of the drive. So the partition is still there, intact, except I cannot find it.

I know that editing the "fstab" is not going to help -- at least not by iteself. Does anyone know how I can recover this partition rather than having to re-create it and ending up with only my partial backup?

[oz]

Check out TestDisk.

I'm pretty sure it should be able to help you recover your lost partition. It's included with the PartedMagic LiveCD if you want to use it from there.

[Cool01]

Many thanks! I used the PartedMagic disc and ran TestDisk. I ran it and ran it, and chickened out and chickened out. . . Finally I committed my result to the drive and rebooted and ran the YaST Partition editor to hook it up. It worked!

That was really nerve wracking. And yet, as I said, it was not even critical data. But I was nervous about messing it all up and having to start loading 10.3 all over again.

I really have to offload some of that stuff.

But all is well. Thanks again!

[oz]

TestDisk will usually work to get the job done.

Very glad to hear all is well.