Mandrake 10 instilation mess up

[sharpy]

i recently tried to install a mandrake 10 community edition distro onto my home computer
i have two hard drives, one for windows and one which has a partition for my documents ect and a partition that i put in when insalling the disk to leave for linux
when instaling, i messed up really quite badly, and instead of installing to just the partition, linux installed itself onto the whole drive
i say linux, but it was probably my fault
i noticed the error as linux was beginning to format, and pressed ctr+alt+del out of desperation
now windows does not recognise the drive atall and im afraid of installing linux again incase i can actually retrieve some files.
is there any way of doing this atall?
i would really like to get them back, however i understand that this is probably not possible
thanks for your time anyhoo

[Smith_mincha]

You might be able to accsess some of your data using a emergancy startup disk. if you still cant access any of your data id say the best thing todo is to reinstall windows and linux.

[fingal]

If you can get hold of a live Linux CD like Knoppix, you could boot it from a CD/DVD and it should see your drives. This might be a good way to retrieve your data without reinstalling anything. Then - with your data safely stored on lets say a USB drive - you could begin again.

[sharpy]

i have a live copy of ubuntu!
would this work allright?
just aslong as it runs from the disk and its linux right?
thankyou all very much
made my day you guys have