Data recovery help needed

[Jaffa]

Ive really f**ked up here, i d/l a firewall proggy (smoothwall v2)
and ran the install, it asked me for the network driver I dont seem to have 1) so i aborted.

B4 this tho it was making a partition and now my pc wont boot as it says it cant find op system (xp home).

So i put xp cd rom in and re-installed but it showed me 4 partitions, 1 with 8mb, 1 with 15mb, 1 with 14999mb and 1 with 59000mb. I deleted the first 2 and installed windows in the 3rd, which it formatted first.

Now i have xp and it says my hd (c) is 15gb.

I assume all my data is in the last partition but can i get it back and if so how.

All help very much appreciated.

[Aido]

This is a bit more of a fuck up than you think mate, Smoothwall erases *everything* on the disk..

The partitions you are seeing are Linux partitions for boot, swap, system and logs etc...

Its doubtful XP will see any NTFS partitions as Smoothwall erases absolutely everything on the disk - maybe if you get hold of something like Tiramisu it might help a bit but that doesn't sound good mate..

You've installed XP again and so half the stuff that was left will have been overwritten now as well..

The installation documentation does state it erases everything and I think they warn you in the installer but it is a bummer

Did you have any other hard disks in there as they would still be okay....

[Jaffa]

no other hard drives.

I now have c partition 15gb (approx 14gb availble space)with xp on and f partition which says non dos and has 56gb but only 2mb of available space.

[Aido]

More than likely nadgered mate, afraid to say it's most likely all gone..

Try and get hold of a copy of Tiramisu or OnTrack Data Recovery, think they do an evaluation version you can use to check if it can actually recover anything...

All the best mate anyway, sorry I can't help anymore..