hdinstall erased wrong partition for swap

[droy]

I installed Knoppix in my HD. Before the partitioning tool was run I had the following partitions:

/dev/hda1 (win1)
/dev/hda2 (linux)
/dev/hda5 (win2)

I didn't have a swap partition for the previous Linux installation since it was only for trying it out. Since I am now thinking about switching to Linux, I removed /dev/hda2 which was 5GB and created two new partitions with one of them being a swap partition of 500MB.

So in the partitioning tool, I was shown the following information:

/dev/hda1 (win)
/dev/hda2 (linux)
/dev/hda5 (swap)
/dev/hda6 (win2)

So when I clicked ok I came to a page where I was asked whether I wanted /dev/hda5 to use as a swap partition. I agreed since I thought that he would have rearranged the internal partition map. Only later I realized that there was a message after writing the partition table which was something like "The partition table was written to disk but couldn't be reloaded."

To cut it short: My old /dev/hda5 partition was taken as swap partition though the partition type is still Fat32. I cannot access my partition anymore even from within WinXP and I wonder whether all the data was lost or can I do something to get it back?

[bongski55]

Partitions formatted under Linux ext2,3,reiser,or xfs are not visible under windows-as regular disk partitions like D,E,F,etc. However you can still check their presence by using Partition magic( and sometimes the DRDos fdisk).
Also if you boot with the knoppix cd it should show your partitons with no problems. Then there is Qt parted.
If you want the data on your old partition I think that is gone.

You did not mention if your HD install was successful?

[Stephen]

So when I clicked ok I came to a page where I was asked whether I wanted /dev/hda5 to use as a swap partition. I agreed since I thought that he would have rearranged the internal partition map. Only later I realized that there was a message after writing the partition table which was something like "The partition table was written to disk but couldn't be reloaded."

Also included in the warning was a line telling you to re-boot for the changes to take effect which you obviously did not do therefore it over wrote the existing partition that was read from the old table still loaded.