How to recover lost files (partition deleted/formatted)

[emigrant]

On Fri, 2010-05-21 at 15:15 -0400, J wrote:
> 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.
> 

Thanks for your reply.
no I just backed up my home directory.
others gone. :(
and not sure how the VM was using partition.
I just installed the VM and allocated space within jaunty partition
itself. (I think this is what you ask...)

thanks.