I already had WinXP, then I decided to install Suse 9.1. I had 2 logical drives exactly the same size, and I accidentally picked the wrong drive to have Suse installed. The logical drive was NTFS formatted at 36.8 GB. Of course, it is now a linux drive, the main drive for my installation.

Am I totatlly screwed on trying to recover my NTFS files ?

The linux install shouldn't have taken up the whole partition, right?

I've tried Stellar Phoenix and R-Linux recovery software WITHOUT success. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Well, I've never been able to recover data after that level of destruction. But, there is always the important lesson to learn:

When you are going to install Linux in a dual boot system with one Hard drive (and you have existing data).....IMAGE, IMAGE, IMAGE!!!!!

Yep (most likely).

It doesn't matter that Linux didn't take up the whole space because it still changed the file system on the drive.

You might be able to pay some professionals to try to recover the data. It will be very expensive and the chanes of success are slim.

is there really no more solution for this problem. I am also experiencing the same problem. i also installed mandrakelinux, and accidentally removed and formatted my fat32 partition which all my data are in. so is there really no more hope for this..... plz help?????