please help with old parition problems

[reeboker]

Firstly I would like to say hello.

I'm really unexperienced tux user just switched from win. I have this one problem, were installing opensuse 2x times, when experimenting and stuff I messed up something really hard so that I could only boot in the console or black screen. And because I don't know (yet) how to recover in the terminal itself i did second install. But I'm keeping the last partition as there are files which are important to me. They were located in home folder (filesys ext3 as same as the one now used in the new install), but what I've found out the partition is mounted by itself in /usr and there's no home folder where I had the files used before.

Does anyone know how to get/recover/find/copied couple files to current partition used, and format the old ext3 and then merge it with the current ext3 so I would have the same setting like before (one primary one swap)?

Or did I messed up in the installation by saying that the current used partition I would like primary as the old one and therefore are the files lost forever because it was deleted in the shrinking process. Is there any workaround? If you need any output from console I would be glad to provide it.

Thx in advance

BTW: Maybe one more thing to mention, now I got KDE3 desktop as primary, before I think it was 4, wish that would not complicate the solution if there is some.

[caf4926]

If you can boot what you have: Open a terminal and switch to su and do:

fdisk -l

post result here

If you can't boot your system, use a live cd, a SUSE one will do but I like Parted Magic: Downloads
You can use the Roxterm in there to get the fdisk info

You can even mount your partitions and check if your data is there and copy it off if you want.

[reeboker]

Disk /dev/sda: 40.0 GB, 40007761920 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4864 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xd3c3d3c3

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 1960 15735667 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 4570 4864 2369556+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda3 1960 4570 20964825 83 Linux

Partition table entries are not in disk order

Does it help...

BTW: As I've said before, the sda3 is mounted as /usr, and where I try to search for my old files they are not there, so I think that the whole /home folder was re-writen and therefore the data lost. Let me know if I'm mistaken.

[caf4926]

Looks like you are correct.

And in which case you lost it all I'm afraid.

And FYI a better layout is
swap (2GB approx)
/ (root) 20GB
/home (all the rest)

A separate /usr in addition to the above is not for novices IMO. Don't confuse 'usr' with your user account which is /home.
'usr' stores application info/data

[reeboker]

Hmmmm, nice me very happy then.

Well, thanks for the walkthrough. I'm going to make one more fresh one then.