Using dd would should of changed the MBR to that of the image. So the output of the fdisk does not make sense.

Don't change anything on the drive to protect the files from being overwritten. You can use dd to create an image just in case if you have sufficient space on another drive.

Have you tried running any of the suggested apps to recovery the files yet?

I have not tried to run any of the suggested apps yet. I had to suspend this activity due to the holiday and family needs. I got back on here today because I forgot to write the suggestions down and needed to get them off of the post. When I saw new activity I diverted my efforts towards the suggested readings. I am certainly not opposed to trying the suggestions. All of the suggested apps are available in Debian, so they are certainly on my list of things to try.

However, before I do, if it makes any difference, I did not dd of=external drive, I did:
Is that not basically the same thing? I would assume that the iso image had some type of partition table, and that my command would have overwritten the original with that of the image, which I would expect of dd as well.

As long as the .iso is a hybrid image, that should work fine.

It does, as long as you don't type:when you meant to type:(meant sdd but typed sdb).

What is the ISO image?

It is the 650MB Ubuntu 10.10 cd iso.

Well I am sad to report that I was unable to recover anything from the drive. After the better part of two days of messing with it, I re-partitioned/re-formatted.

Thanks to all that took time to help, and a valuable lesson learned by me.

Regards,
PK