ok so i'll outline what happened

i was reinstalling fedora a couple of weeks ago and the installer decided to go for hdb by default instead of hda. i didn't notice this and was in a hurry so just clicked to proceed and realised stright away what i'd done. it only took and instant ot flick to the next screen and there was next to no disk activity.
now the disk is inaccessible and as a result i've lost 120gig worth of data. the drive was formatted as ext3 but i managed to do it in quite a strange way because i was new to linux at the time. rather than being /dev/hdb1 (only one partition on the disk) it was labeled as just /dev/hdb. i don't know if this has any relevence t othe way in which the partition table would be structured or not because i know that usually the device name without the number refers to the whole device and not a single partition.

desipite the strangeness of the device names i would like to know if anyone has any ideas how i can restore the data or somehow pull the data off onto another drive. i've tried a couple of tools i've found on the net and managed to scan and find the previous ntfs partition info and it also found some linux info but couldn't piece it together.

any help would be greatly appreciated as i've lost an awful lot of data.

thanks
pat

Assuming you have another distro you can boot, and do not write to the troubled partition, you may be able to use cfdisk to restore the partition tables. Study the man pages carefully before you act. Do some google research on cfdisk capabilities and how to use them before you act.

Otherwise, search for utilities with raw read capabilities to try to recover your data.