Recover a wrongly partitioned hard disk, Ubuntu 6.06 Beta

It's been a long day.  The resumes that I sent out started to work out and I have two phone interviews in a row today.  

Work out at the gym and got really wore out, because of the flu that I caught today.  Terrible flu, it almost ruin all the fun watching the rented "Wallace & Gromit"  (the first one) 

I tried to install Ubuntu 6.06 yesterday by upgrading the 5.10 breezy badger, but ends up with an error on X.org server and couldn't start it.  Hence I decided to reinstall the whole Linux partition by using the Live CD installer "espresso."  This turn out to be a big mistake, there is a bug in the installer and  it almost take away all the data in my Windows NTFS partition~!

Luckily I was able to restore the Windows partition following some advice of another website (sorry, can't locate it now).  But basically what I did was simple:  since my Windows partition is the first one on the drive, I was able to make a larger partition (using fdisk, slightly large so I do not "short-guessed" the cylender number and corrupt any data) and when this is done, the data is back~!  DO NOT format the new partition though.  Once you are done re-partitioning, mount it in a test location and you can see all the data returned.

 It's been a long day… and tomorrow I would be trying to do this installation again, and hopefully I can get my system back soon.