Lost a hard drive!? Help.

[Jim Herrmann]

I have lost a partition!  How can I get it back?  It's not critical that I get 
it back, but I'd like to learn how I might fix it.  It was a 40 gig data 
drive from which I had just recently wiped windoze, repartitioned, and 
mounted as /data.  I was in the process of ripping a bunch of my CDs and 
storing them on this "new" partition.  I had like 25 - 30 albums, about 2 gig 
of mp3s.  It's no big data loss, because I can always rip agin, but it costs 
my time, and this isn't suppose to happen in Linux.  

I'm not sure what happened exactly.  I was doing several things at once, 
including ripping and encoding, and also doing a large FTP transfer outbound.  
I left my machine to chew on all this work and I came back and it was 
completly frozen.  I tried all the tricks I knew to unfreeze, but I ended up 
hitting the reset button.  Thinking, no problem, I'm running ext3, so it 
should just do the journal thing, and we'll be back up.  Well, when It came 
back up, I missed exactly what messages were issued, expecting no problem,b 
but, the /data partition was empty, except for a lost+found directory.

Can someone explain to me what may have happened, and how I might be able to 
fix it?  Better yet, avoid a problem like this in the future.  I would be 
really pissed if there was critical data on that drive.  I have time to 
investigate and fix if someone has some ideas.

BTW, I'm running Mandrake 9.0.

Thanks,
Jim Herrmann