I was working on installing Ubuntu to my computer alongside Windows.
I'd already uninstalled the previoius version of the OSS OS, but this
time I was making all the linux partitions, such as /var etc.. I put a
liveCD into the computer in order to create a logical drive under my
third primary, and was using GParted when I hit "SetDisklabel." Now, I
was thinking this might be the option to "label" to label an
unallocated space on the drive. It asked "this will delete hda, are
you sure you want to contine," and "yes," and now I have a 100GB
"unallocated" drive/partition (and an MSDOS disklabel for it) in
GParted.

I had two ntfs and one fat16 partitions. The fat16 was for the mbr,
the first ntfs was 10GB Windows and the second was approximately 30 or
40 GB Files, which interestingly, I'd put in there to protect in case
I screwed-up the OS, though that had never happened before.

How, then, do I "reverse" this process? Since I didn't shred anything
or format any drives yet, I'm guessing the data should still be on the
disk and recoverable, right? How do I recover it, is the disklabel
just some bits that say "stuff on here," or what? I'm a college
biology student and I need the files soon.

Any help is tremendously appreciated, I've yet to find anything on
this topic, though someone, somewhere, must have made this mistake.

If an answer helps me solve this before 8am tomorrow morning (i.e. an
answer by 12 or 1 am tonight) I will keep the price at 40 dollars.
After that I'll put it back to 30 (original idea) because, frankly,
college is financially draining, and I don't have much cash as it is,
but I need the data, and quickly.

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Clarification of Question by infinitelink-ga on 25 Mar 2006 00:48 PST

By the way, this is a Dell Inspirton XPS laptop, so it only has one HD
and no more--and the whole thing is what I described. Do I need an
external HD as well, then, I wonder?

Hi infinitelink-ga,
I think you can't do a real reverse operation, but step by step you can solve.
You can try to extract data from your big partition using software like this:
EasyRecovery: http://www.ontrack.com/software/
Undelete: http://www.ntfs.com/products.htm

To do this operation you have to install the software in a different
partition (in this case in a different disk) from that you have to
recover. The disk has to be big to store the data recovered.

After that operation you can redefine partitions like you prefer using
GParted again. Then you just have to move again the data in the right
hd, the original one.

Sorry for my awful english :-)
Hope this helps!
Byebye

Download Knoppix live CD and the "undelete" the partition deletion by
folowing this VERY rough procedure that I wrote for someone last week:

http://tinyurl.com/kofct