About a month ago I rearranged all my partitions so I could reinstall some operating systems. This worked nicely until yesterday.

I tried to make a new partition in some free space (using GParted) to install Windows. And from that point, something seems to have gone badly wrong.

My partitions disappeared.

Using some restoration software such as TestDisk, does make my partitions appear. Well, the main one I am interested in, a 300GB logical partition shows up, but when the partition table is restored and the disk is looked at in other software, it looks like the partition is in the wrong place. Also, the file system (EXT3) is not accessible.

I'm 99.8% sure that the data is all there on the drive still, but I just don't seem to be able to get at the partition(s).

This isn't critical as I can reinstall the OS, and most of the data is backed up, but I would like to recover what is on the disk if possible rather than using my crude backups.

I suppose an option would be to buy another 500GB HD and use Photorec or similar to just try and recover the files from the disk.

Any suggestions?
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