Was installing Gentoo last night and it hung in the middle. I wasn't thinking and let it drop one of my partitions on a separate hard drive for the /swap. Now the partition tables on that hard disk are gone (80 GB disk).

I used dfsee (www.dfsee.com) and it tells me the partition signatures are still there. I could not figure out how to rewrite the partition table with it, however.

Is there any tools that can do either of the following (linux preferred)
a)rewrite the partition table so that its like nothing happened
or
b)recover the files from the ruined partition to another drive

any experiences welcome

File Scavenger worked great for me at recovering a goofed up disk array. You might give it a try.

Of course it's a $40 program . . . I'm sure someone here can point to you a freeware program.

dfsee actually did the trick for me, only that I couldnt verify the partition tables from within my windows live cd or gentoo. knoppix is playing back from it right now. if it wasnt 2 1/2 year old knoppix i'd try to backup the files while i have them. hopefully they survive kubuntu

anyways, with dfsee - after it did an analysis of the drive and found where the signatures where, i had to create a log file to feed to the program. the file looked like
part (the partition)
cr(create) log(logical) (file system type) -sizesize in mb) (cylinder #)

bit scary, but not as scary as losing 30 gb of handripped mp3s. or my geek cred. at least i have the mp3s.