I am led to believe that at the low-level there can be as many as four historical partitions on a disk. Lets call them A-D.

Let's also day that partition D has been overwitten by partition C a while ago. I come along and delete that partition and make partition B. Onto this new partion I create an xfs file system and copy another HDD's data to it. Check it, all's fine. This is disk 1.

Then I rebuild the 'puter and install disk with partition 'B' alongside a newly made hardware RAID (disk 2). Boot and install the new system onto disk 2. However when I boot the new system and mount disk 1(partition B) the data is nowhere to be found. In it's place is not even a partition A but what seems to be the data remnants of partition C. My new partition B with it's data is nowhere to be found.

I'm running a program called R-Studio over the disk to try to find the data. But what I'd really like to try is to find out how to manipulate those older partition tables to bring any one of them to the top of the pile.

Does't thou know of other posts, infra, that cover this or any other tools, HOWTO's or what-not I can bring to bear upon this issue?

:-) Peter

there is a utility called testdisk that is very very good for detecting old/damaged partitions and restoring them to their former glory, though if a partition was formatted over then recovery of data is unlikely