System: Pent 4 3ghz, 1gb ram, 160gb hdd & so on.
Former XP install: c:/ ~ 60gb, d:/ ~ 100gb.

What happened:
De-fragmented d: (less than a fifth full)
All data in drive placed well before first third of drive.
Using Suse 9.2 CD went ahead and resized d: down to 60gb
Created: swap, /boot & / and installed. Apparently I missed or perhaps misread the notice warning about data on the unused resized partition, d: was about to be formatted along with my newly created / (hda3). I expected XP not to recognize d: I laid that expectation on Linux (it sees it as an empty drive).

Could the data still be there intact waiting for the partition table to be reconstructed?

If the drive was indeed formated are there any data recovery utilities available?

Any aid in retrieving this lost drive will be greatly appreciated!

jdlr

p.s: my back up media (DVDs) are physically damaged.

Windows should be able to read a resized NTFS partition (If it is resized properly).

Doubtful. With most filesystems, I'd say no. I think NTFS may keep some information at the end of the partition (I'm trying to remember if it is non-vital, or if you are supposed to convince windows to move it in the defrag stage).

If you determine to try it, use the fdisk utility in linux to delete the partitions and create it again. For some reason unknown to me, Windows typically leaves apx 8MB free next to some ntfs partitions.

That depends on the format. If I remember, SuSE takes a while to format. This would mean that it does a badblocks test during the format. If this is the case, then no. Recovering overwritten data is an expensive laboratory activity. If not, then perhaps, but I don't have any good suggestions.

Bummer.

Try this also (perhaps first). run "fdisk -l" to have a look at your drive. After you make are sure that you have the drive name correct, try "guessfstype /dev/hd??" (replacing the ??, obviously). If it does indeed say ext3 or reiserfs, then it has been formated. If not, then you may want to make sure that it is mounted ("cat /proc/mounts").