First off, let me say, I am not dead. I just happened to let this site stagnate over the summer :( I'll try to post something once a week for the rest of the semester.
Anyways, so the other night I was in the computer lab and one of my buddies' laptop's USB ports was acting funny so he asked me if I could format an external hard drive for him. It sounded simple enough so I just plugged in the drive, fired up gparted, and hit delete a couple of times and sent it off to work. I noticed that it never deleted the last 2 partitions and showed them as locked as if they were mounted or something. I was puzzled for a few seconds and then noticed a popup informing me that "Macintosh HD" had been unplugged (I dual-boot kubuntu on my MacBook). Then I realized what I had just done. I erased the entry for my MacOS partition! ack!
Fortunately I'm a geek though. I may have been stupid enough to erase my partitions, but I was also smart enough to get them back. After a bit of research I discovered that parted has a nice rescue option! So, I printed out the partition table (using the "print" command), and then typed rescue and supplied the beginning of the unallocated space and the end of the unallocated space as the bounds for the search and parted was able to recover my partitions! In retrospect, I am extremely thankful I didn't blindly continue to format the drive :) I hope this information ends up being useful to someone someday. Thanks for reading.
