ghost cd of xp wiped my hard drive
 

I got my hands on a Ghost DVD of Windows XP SP2 and tried to install it on my computer that also runs Slackware Linux. It prompted me to reinitialize the disk and i took that as the windows partition that previously held Windows 2000. I typed yes and it proceeded to quick format my entire 80GB drive. I lost everything from music to movies to schoolwork and photos. I have heard of people using partition magic to recover an accidentely deleted partition but that was usually with a bootable OS. In my case there is nothing to boot but the data should still be there since it was only a quick 30 second format. Is there a program that will let me navigate the sectors of the hard disk and recover my Linux files?

Look at ddrescue. From a CD/DVD bootable Linux, of course (like, say, Knoppix 4), not a fresh installation.

Be sure to read the info pages first -- you may be able to recover the whole thing.

Good luck!

http://www.sysresccd.org/

This may help.

How would i use this disk to repair my partitions? Are there certain utilities i should be using? I'm fairly new to linux and try to do as much by trial and error but this is the biggest hurdle i have come across and want to step lightly since I have 25GB of data I want to retrieve safely. If you could tell me what steps need to be taken, it would be much appreciated.

I don't know if you will be able to get back data after you overwrote it.
http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/
If you can restore the partition.

http://qtparted.sourceforge.net/
This is a open source partition magic clone.

There is also this.
http://www.sleuthkit.org/

Then there is DD rescue.

Good luck.