[ubuntu-in] Need Help - Disaster during some fiddling with partitioning tool -

[Ramnarayan.K]

Hi

Need some help

I was looking at my On Board Hard disk (80 GB) and there was a
partition that was lying unused and i wanted to reformat it to VFAT.
For some reason gparted did not allow me to do anything, so very
*stupidly* i checked the change disklabel option and said yes to msdos
disklabel.

Needless to say it blew all my partitions away and said that it has
reformatted my disk (within a few seconds)

So right now there is just one grey blob that show up as an
unformatted disk /dev/sda about 75 Gigs.

the existing partions were

sda1    ntfs - about 10 Gig  with win xp OS (came by default with the machine)
sda2    vfat  - about 5 Gig windows recovery (came by default with the machine)
sda3 -  vfat - about 6 gig shared data section (
sda 4 - logical volume under which the following partitions were created
sda 5 - ext 3 /home  about 40 gig - my home - where all the data is
sda6 - ext3 /boot about 100 mb
sda7 - swap about 2.5 gig
sda8 - ext3 /   where my linux os is located
sda9 - ext3 -- this was the blank partition (i had a second ubuntu
8.04installed here and was trying to free this space to use. But I was
doing this from 7.04 and it may not have been able toread sda9 which
was created by a *later* version

***
I am not fiddling with the HD disk but have booted off a live cd and
am checking the HD with testdisk - which seems to show all the
critical partitions. At the worst case i want to recover my /home
which i did not back up for the last 15 days and there is stuff there
which i don't want to lose.

At the best case i want to return my hd to the previous working
configuration which has dual boot - ubuntu 7.04 and Windows Xp (there
is also a windows recovery boot option)

*** Like i said Test Disk is showing  most of the partitions namely

Disk /dev/sda - 80 GB / 74 GiB - CHS 9729 255 63
     Partition               Start        End    Size in sectors
* HPFS - NTFS              0   1  1  1304 254 63   20964762 [IBM_PRELOAD]
P FAT32 LBA             1305   0  1  2033 254 63   11711385
L Linux Swap            2034   1  1  2495 254 63    7421967
L Linux                 2959   1  1  3759 254 63   12868002 [/]
L Linux                 3760   1  1  9089 254 63   85626387 [/home]

it seems to be not showing /boot and the sda3 (the shared data drive)

i don't mind losing sda3 because that data is backed up.

***
test disk shows the following options
Disk /dev/sda - 80 GB / 74 GiB - CHS 9729 255 63

[ Analyse  ]  Analyse current partition structure and search for lost partitions
[ Advanced ]  Filesystem Utils
[ Geometry ]  Change disk geometry
[ Options  ]  Modify options
[ MBR Code ]  Write TestDisk MBR code to first sector
[ Delete   ]  Delete all data in the partition table
[ Quit     ]  Return to disk selection

Note: Correct disk geometry is required for a successful recovery. 'Analyse'
process may give some warnings if it thinks the logical geometry is mismatched.

***
should i use any of these options ??
if so what

what else should i do

am appending the testdisk.log

thanks
ram