Andrei,

I Googled 'open source find and restore ext3 partition' and found http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk among others, that should be able to at least recover files on that partition.

So, pop in a cd/usb with bootable linux and give it a whirl. I'm sure we'd love a feedback on how it turned out.

If you installed BSD yourself, this would ve relatively easy. If not, it should be for the person that did.

Side question, why was ext3 even used with BSD? I thought it wasn't really supported (since recently?)

ok I tried easeus Free edition... but it did not find my OLD FreeBSD files or partitions ... it just found my existing NTFS partition on the hard drive (that Windows installed)... So it just told me what I already know... it just showed me my new partition that is sitting on top of the OLD partition that I lost.

Don - I have a knopix livecd somewhere and I will try it now. Oh and I used ext3 because SAMBA... the Windwos file sharing server... supports only that... I think it doesnt support the fbsd fs... basically.....


I had a File Server with FreeBSD... it had a Ext3 partition set up with a Samba server listening on it... and thats why I use ext3. I am trying to recover files that were being shared by the file server.

Some of these programs have options for you to give it a hint at what filesystem was on there to help it find stuff. I've had to do that before doing a RAW recovery which is even slower.
Looks like you are out of luck since it's Windows only:
http://www.easeus.com/datarecoverywizard/help/raw-recovery.htm