fresh install results in missing partition

[REVEREND_FLIBBLE]

I decided to install fedora 64-bit and attemped to do so using plop and a USB live image, but failed misserably. Plop wouldn't respond if I had the USB device installed.

I then tryed to install from a CD, however the image was corrupt and half way through the install it crashed (learned my lesson about verification)

Finally i burnt out another install disk and successfuly installed fedora. however I lost access to data on one of my drives. partition /dev/sdb1 used to take up the entire drive. and was full of miscelanious data. Now /dev/sdb1 does'nt even exist in my /dev/ folder

Is there a way for me to recover this information. I believe that the partition was ext3

[root@localhost probinso]# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xab488dd3

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1          65      522081   83  Linux
/dev/sda2              66         326     2096482+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda3             327       31080   247030784   83  Linux
/dev/sda4           31081       38913    62918572+   5  Extended
/dev/sda5           31081       38913    62914560   83  Linux

Disk /dev/sdb: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x4cd442a4

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1   *           1           1           0    0  Empty
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.

[yancek]

Your fdisk output for sdb1 doesn't look promising. The SystemrescueCD with TestDisk might help?

Download - SystemRescueCd

I've not had to use it myself but see it recommended often. There is a link to documentation at the bottom of the page in the link above and it would be a good idea to read that to get familiar with it.