Can a partition be reversed/undone?

I have an external hard drive backup disk that is/was partitioned into two parts. I wanted to increase the size of volume 1 and in doing so erased volume 2.
I did this in Disk Utility by trying to resize volume 2 (I changed the value for the volume size in the dialogue box). Nothing in the warnings seemed to indicate that this volume would be erased - but it is!! I would REALLY like to undo this and recover the data but it doesn't seem I can. Given that the operation took only a number of secs, I can't imagine that it's been physically erased.
Does anyone know how to undo this action or how otherwise to recover the data?
(I should note that volume 1 is formatted for Time machine, whereas volume 2 is/was formatted for Windows (FAT32 I think))

Provided you do nothing more with the drive, the information should still be recoverable with third party software. I haven't got it to hand at the moment, but I suspect DiskWarrior may be able to help.
You can't resize a partition without erasing it in Disk Utility. There are some third party apps which can do this however. (*Drive Genius* I think is one)

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