Lost Partitions!!

Hey guys hope you can gelp me out!! I got infected by some nastys and we tried to sort it here http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=182665 but unfortunately i settled for a reinstall.

So i grabbed my data before i reinstalled but i couldn't find any writeable media so i just stuck in my old unused sata and copied accross the data i wanted. Everything copied fine. Now this unused HDD has no OS on it and it was partitioned into 3 sections as i did intend using it 1 day but just never used it. Anyway i started the reinstall and when you come to the XP screen where it shows you your options of which partition to install i didn't pay attention and i went and deleted my partitions on the hdd i just put my data on!!!:zzz:zzz When i realized what i had done it was to late!!! The good news is that i never actually formatted the hdd, just the partitions are lost, well i hope!!

I tried to use acronis to recover the partitions but it says no partitons are found!

Are my parttitions and data gone or is there still hope?

 

any ideas here guys?

 

Test Disk is the only free software that I know of that might help. It supposedly can find partitions and rewrite the partition table. It has a bit of a learning curve so you want to read carefully. I haven't used it in a couple of years so I can't really give any pointers. I believe you can go through all the steps and then not commit to any changes if you want to see what it might be capable of finding without actually changing the data on your drive.