Rescueing files from over written partition

Stky10

Person at work, had an XP machine (or possibly win2000 doesnt really
matter anyway), decided to install Solaris 10 for sh*ts and giggles to
try it out, but wanted to have it as a dual boot machine. Anyway he
booted off the cd, and it gave him the option of using fdisk to create a partition, which he did, and then things started to go wrong, there were errors all over the place apparently.

Anyway, now nothing boots, not in to windows or solaris. Booting
off a windows cd gives the option of deleting the partition because
Windows cannot tell what format it is. I've booted into it with Knoppix,
but it cannot read /dev/hda1 (is ZFS the new default file system for
Solaris 10??).

So....I'm thinking that even though the disk is probably toast as
far as getting windows working on it again without deleting the
partition and installing windows from the beginning, is there anyway
of trying to rescue some files off it without having to pay thousands
to some professionals (which aint going to happen). I'm sure that
whatever formatting took place wouldnt have overwritten all the
sectors on the disk...

Canis Lupus

Partitions arent my thing (can never be bothered splitting my drives up). But would connecting the drive to another machine as a slave and seeing if its recognised work?

Stky10

I doubt it, I dont think its an NTFS disk anymore, what it is I dont
know, but if Knoppix or the windows setup cant read it then I doubt
if a windows box could read it either.

Although I do have a windows undelete utility, but it probably
would only work on a NTFS disk.

Capt'n Midnight

Might be worth posting on the Unix forum

using the knoppix cd - qtparted - should list what it thinks is there so you can see if the partition is trashed or not.
gpart (console) - guess partition might be able to find other references to it

Make a note of the geometry of the drive CHS as the above utils may not guess correctly.

Hobbes

Didn't Norton have a toolkit for doing this?