Mandriva 2009 installation noob..lost data

HI,
Today i thought of giving a try for the mandriva 2009 and ended up in losing 390gb of valuable data .here goes the whole story.

I have two hdds in my machine 200g and 500g. 200g has XP in it and 500g have VISTA-40gb,data 390gb,20gb(partitioned drive) reserved for XP, and another 20gb unalocated space reserved for mandriva.

today i tried to install the Mandriva in the 500g drive... it aske me for some deletion kind of warning, i said no....and selected the manual allocation opton.when i selected the unalocated space, it automatically given 8gb for the mout point/ and 2gb for swap and 4gb for the media.

Installtion ended and it have shown the message "remove the disk and reboot"
i tried to remove it but drive did not come out...finally restated the machine hoping to remove the disk at the time of reboot....

while rebooting, the wizard got stuck at about 95% for about 30 min.So i pressed the restart button and rebooted.....

while restarting, grub has thrown me an error "error 20 or 18"(i actually did not remember that error).
system start failed.....
i tried to install it again and failed for the second time with same reason....

Then i stared machine from second hdd and fomatted the Mandriva partitions to mandriva as shown in pic below, hoping that vista might get started...
i was able to format the mandriva drives but still getting the error 20 while rebooting.... and shocking is that i lost the whole data in the 390g drive.



http://i36.tinypic.com/22hw5g.jpg

Now some one please tell me how to recover that data....its very valuable data for me

i am planning to use the TrueImage11 as per the suggestion of Dark star...

Hope some one hels me...


thanks

Ouch that must have hurt.....I was gonna install Mandriva in the same manner but looking at this I'm a little scared. Now I'm thinking on how to proceed.

I have installed same Mandriva 2009 on free space of 640GB WD.Installation was damm easy just after 12-13 minutes i was with fully installed system.

In your case something weird happened during disk arrangement.
Well mate try PTTD/Some thing else software to regain access to unallocated space as NTFS with full data.PTTD worked for me most of time.

the update is that... my HDD is responding well to data recovery tools....started the data recovery and recovered about 100gb of data..

Million Thanks to the GET DATA BACK FOR NTFS tool.....

No need to get scared ! Just use your brain before partitioning , docn't just click next and it wail be fine I never learn partitioning when I used the CLI installer I figured it out ! Its just basic .. Create 2 partitions one of 10-15 Gb on you need for / "Linux File System" and other 1-2 Gb for swap.. If you want "only" the create a seperate /home else its not important !


Better ! Now after backup install it with care !

Hope will not mess us next time

I have recovered the whole data.. and was able to install mandriva success fully...

not able to configure the internet connection and sound card driver...

My internet is Airtel and i am using 7.1 audigy live card.

For Sound:
The linux support of Creative is messy as creative does not make Official linux drivers
Try Looking your device, check if its supported. Matrix:Vendor-Creative Labs - AlsaProject
also wait for better opnion as i didn't use a creative sound card before.

For Internet:

How to you connect to internet?
LAN or USB
check Mandriva Linux Control Center
ControlCenter - Mandriva Community Wiki

sorry for going off topic , But what are the improvements of the 2009 version over the 2008 version?

^^Check this Mandriva 2009.0 Discussion Thread

I am having a wierd problem in Mandriva.
My sound is very very faint i.e if i plug my earphones in my Lappy i can listen a faint sound ...everything is at full volume.
ne ideas guys ?
The Lappy is a Sony Vaio VGN-T350P

^^Open Kmix and increse the PCM level