How to recover lost files (partition deleted/formatted)

[J]

On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 15:03, emigrant <fromwindowstolinux at gmail.com> wrote:
> I deleted jaunty partition which had an xp installed in VB and installed
> lucid.
>
> now can i recover some files which i saved inside the VB?
>
> thanks.

Hope you made backups of your data...

if you had, for instance, /dev/sda3 which was your root fs for Jaunty,
and you deleted/formatted that partition and installed Lucid, game
over.

If you VMs were using partitions as their disks (not sure if VBox
supports using block devices for VMs, but VMWare and Xen/KVM do) then
you should be able to just create a new vm and point it to the
original block device (assuming the block device still exists).

yet one more example of why people should have either a separate /home
partition, or at least a separate /data partition to store important
data on outside the OS proper.