I put this post here because it's more microsoft related but I don't want to go subscribe to some other forum to ask a question.
I was reformatting my hard drive and I deleted the first windows partition I saw. I thought my external hard drive was unplugged when in fact it wasn't. Now all the info that was supposed to go onto my newly formatted drive is gone. Well sorta gone. I deleted it but didn't reformat it.
I downloaded a couple programs which are supposed to find erased files and they seem to be able to find pretty much everything on the drive. The bad news is they all want money to enable the program to rescue it. The fact of the matter is I would really like to get my email addresses pics and a few other things back but not enough to drop $40 - $60 on it.
Does any one know of other options?
I tried several freeware rescue programs but none of them even recognized drive E.

I don't know exactly how to solve your problem, but I can advise to not do anything to the drive until someone more knowledgeable comes along and posts here. You wouldn't want any of the lost data to be overwritten.

If you merely deleted the partition, go get testdisk. It'll be on Knoppix if you happen to have one laying around - open a terminal, "su" (no password), then testdisk.
Doesn't update the disk till you tell it to.

Thank you.
I would hug you if you weren't in Austrailia
It's back perfect as ever.

I'd hug you if you could spell correctly, lucky me you can't.

Young man, it is wrong to insult other people without provocation.

Provocation provided.

You don't know how old he is.......
$20 says I'm older than BOTH of you---but I will neither hug you nor will I correct your English.....

gpart may help you:
http://www.stud.uni-hannover.de/user/76201/gpart/

If you didn't format your hard-drive, it will look for partitions in it. Post the output before doing anything. It's possible to recreate the partition table with fdisk(8) once you know where the partitions reside. Do you remember your past disk geometry ?