Solution to my own stupidity please?

[alicat]

Hi, im new to this forum and also relatively recent to linux. So in true fashion i made a stupid mistake: My friends XP desktop wasnt booting up so i thought i could try and recover any data using a live cd. I tried Ubuntu & Knoppix and they both ran to slow to do anything worthwhile so stupidly i created new partitions at the start of the disk to install linux, over the 1st 2.5G of the NTFS partition and see if i could mount the remainder of the NTFS partition.....Doh! javascript:emoticon('')

Does anyone know of any programs for linux that i can install in Ubuntu to recover any of the relevant data (partition table, MBR or whatever i need) so i can view the old NTFS files & save what i want to another volume? Free if possible!

I know there is plenty of software available for windows platforms but im not sure if its possible to crossover an xp machine to the ubuntu to scan the physical drive with that software..etc....

a

[variant]

testdisk

Multi-platform tool to check and undelete partition, supports reiserfs, ntfs, fat32, ext2/3 and many others. Also includes PhotoRec to recover pictures from digital camera memory.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/index.html?testdisk.html

[alicat]

can this be used with the existing Ubuntu OS to scan and repair an old partition table for the old NTFS which the linux has been formatted and installed over, thus allowing me to access the remaining data on the old NTFS partition?