restoring partitions after a cfdisk bug deleted them

[Sy Ali]

I'm doing some googling now, but maybe someone in the know would have
a simple-ish answer..



I used cfdisk to delete some partitions and make them anew (i.e. to
merge them) and it instead deleted them *and* deleted all partitions
after those, combining them all into "free space".

I only noticed this after mkfs -j those partitions which I recreated.
I have since rebooted the system but have made no other change.


So I have a few partitions, and then a big block of free space.  And I
need to recover a couple of partitions at the end.  I know how large
they are, if that helps.. I have a twin backup HDD with the same
partitioning scheme as the primary hdd had.  It's partitioning is
probably a clone of what the first drive had, right down to the byte.


This is what the primary hdd's partitioning has become:

    sda1                    Primary   Linux swap / Solaris                 8.23
    sda2                    Primary   Linux swap / Solaris              1003.49
    sda3        Boot        Primary   Linux ext3                          16.46
                            Pri/Log   Free Space                      319042.17

This is what the backup hdd's partitioning is like:

    sdb1                    Primary   Linux swap / Solaris                 8.23
    sdb2                    Primary   Linux swap / Solaris              1003.49
    sdb3        Boot        Primary   Linux ext3                        5000.98
    sdb5                    Logical   Linux ext3                          16.46
    sdb6                    Logical   Linux ext3                        1003.49
    sdb7                    Logical   Linux ext3                        1998.75
    sdb8                    Logical   Linux ext3                        1003.49
    sdb9                    Logical   Linux ext3                        3002.23
    sdb10                   Logical   Linux ext3                        1003.49
    sdb11                   Logical   Linux ext3                        1003.49
    sdb12                   Logical   Linux ext3                      235004.48
    sdb13                   Logical   Linux ext3                       70021.81

Given this problem, what's the best way to restore the data of the
last two partitions on "sda12" and "sda13" (wherever they went) ?

Seeing as I do have a backup, there is that easy solution.  But my
last backup was too long ago for me to want to roll back so easily.
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