Hello

I have had my 500gb HDD (WDC5000) split into 2 partitions for a while. Windows (NTFS) residing on the 1st partition, Linux (EXT3) residing on the 2nd.

I recently took the very poor decision to use a Windows utility supplied on a magazine coverdisk (Paragon Partition Manager) to resize the EXT3 partion from within Windows. I first decreased the size of the windows partition down to 250gb and then increased the size of the ext3 partition to 250gb (from 90gb). The operation completed successfully.

However, the system would then not boot! complaining of a bad superblock. I booted into Ubuntu with the live CD and reinstalled grub to the disk's MBR. This allowed me to begin the boot process from the EXT3 filesystem. The Ubuntu logo came up and there was some progress, however there was a serious error (I did not note it down, unfortunately) and I was dumped into a maintenance mode shell and advised to run a manual fsck.

I booted the system with the live CD again and ran an fsck -y ... this ran for 3 solid days, complaining of inode issues. I eventually Ctrl-C'd the process as I imagined it was broken.

Now, I am stuck. I cannot boot into my EXT3 partition !

I need the advice of a guru on how to recover my file system. Help is invaluable and appreciated beyond measure as this partition contained 4 years worth of non-backed up photos and my wife's entire university course !

I have learned a lesson here, however I am willing to go to absolutely any length to recover the data. Incidently, the one file I need to recover from the partition is a 27gb VMDK (VMWare virtual disk image) file.

Are there any recommended utilities? I am assuming that the data is still written to the disk although everything described above will have corrupted the file tables.

Many Thanks
Chris

That fsck really reduced the chances of successful recovery.

Getting the pictures and documents may still be possible, although it is also possible that fsck made irreparable mess. Getting the VMDK intact is unlikely, without seeing the drive.

Can you do something yourself? Sure. Research data carving.

You will need two new drives equal to or larger than original. You will need to image the defective drive onto a new drive. You will need to make a copy of that image to another new drive with which you will experiment. You will need data recovery software capable of understanding ext3. You may also need data carving software that can ignore file systems and recover files based on file signatures. Rules - never work with original disk or its master copy, never take shortcuts, assume that once you power down the disk it will never spin up again.

There you go. If you do not understand anything in that paragraph, feed the phrase to almighty Google.

Or... you may want to make this someone else's problem. It won't be cheap, but it would fit under "any length" budget parameter.