HELP!!

[vwgtiturbo]

First, I would like to thank Omoshiroi and gaxprels for the help with a new Slack install.
My next question is a little bit... troubling, to say the least.

I was installing JAMD on a second hard drive, and when the install started, it didn't give me the chance to select what device to install on. I though it was odd, but continued. I then noticed that it was formatting the / directory... ON THE WRONG DRIVE. It made it about 2 seconds into the process before I noticed it, then I cut power to the system.
I then restarted and tried to boot off of the drive that the format started on, and of course I received an error for kernel panic. I restarted again and completed the install of JAMD on the CORRECT drive. I tried to mount the original drive that was incorrectly formatted to try and recover the files. I received error messages from mount stated that it couldn't detect a filesystem type (when I had "auto" in the fstab) or that it was the wrong filesystem type (when I specified various options in the fstab). Is there ANY way I can recover this data (short of spending a thousand dollars for a professional data recovery)? If not, I just lost a semester's worth of work, and that is not good...
Any help would be SO greatly appreciated... You just have no idea...

[sujoki]

personally i dont think you should ever stop the computer while formatting a drive, because then the write head is not put back in place where it is safe, instead it is dropped onto the drive and could cause some bad clusters. or at least i believe so, i think you should have ctrl C'd the process and then ctrl alt deleat to shut the system down porperly.

i have no idea what JAMD is so i cant really help you, but i can say this much, always back up inportant information, i remember one time i was playing with software raid, and i did the raid, but forgot to put a number in the final product or something like that, bam there went my 100 gig lol, was a good reason to do a full format though

[vwgtiturbo]

Yeah, taking the power down probably wasn't a good idea, but the system did not respond to cntrl-alt-del, and I panicked. All I could think was "Holly SH(T!!". It was pretty ugly...

JAMD is just another modified distro (literally). It is heavily based on Red Hat, but I guess is supposed to be leaner, in that it doesn' t have quite as much bloat, and is compiled for i686, so it is supposedly faster. I have yet to see it any faster... When I installed Slack yesterday... THAT was faster. Maybe I was just on crack or something, but it sure felt faster...

[sujoki]

you were not on crack. it IS faster. lol wait untill you learn what you are doing and decide to try gentoo, man now thats speed because everything is not compiled just for a certain architecture, its compiled for YOUR hardware.

[trommaster]

hmm, prolly not bad turning off a pc with todays hard drives, hell, you do it all the time with windows :P :P
try mounting it with explicit type options:
mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/drive -t ext2
or ext3, reiser whatever.
Failing that, you could try the undelete HOWTO:
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Ext2fs-Undeletion.html
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Ext2fs-Undelet...uct/index.html

[sujoki]

alastair i totally agree, but not while formatting.