OT: SD (SDHC) died, anybody knows how to recover ext3 partitions?

[Andre Garzia]

Hello Friends,

This is a way OT call but I believe that people here are a wonderful
source of information and that maybe somebody might have traveled this
road before so it's not a useless try.

I have an Asus EEE PC (701). Its a wonderful machine. I spent lots of
days customizing it for my daily developments. I've used a Transcend
SD (SDHC) card with 16gb worth of storage and installed Ubuntu on that
card. It took me days to get everything working but in the end I had a
machine that I liked very much.

Well, yesterday I did a dirty shutdown during a lockup. After that,
all bugs broke loose, the card stopped booting.

The card had two partitions, one swap and one ext3.

Now, windows will detect the card but will show it as zero bytes card
and will not allow me to do anything with it.

Mac OS X will ignore it.

Linux Xandros will detect and mount it saying it is zero bytes and
will not detect anything.

Linux Ubuntu Live CD using GParted will detect the card and say it is
7gb card!? (it was 16gb and it had way less than 9gb occupied.)

I've given up trying to recover the card, I don't care anymore, I just
want to know if someone knows a software for any operating system
(preference: linux) that will force the format the card back to an
empty 16gb card.

I just don't want to loose the card, I had it for a week and it costed 150 USD.

Any clues?
:-(

TIA
andre

-- 
http://www.andregarzia.com All We Do Is Code.