Last night I made a terrible mistake. I was reinstalling Windows and I accidentally deleted all the partitions on all my drives. I realized my mistake before I had created any partitions, so nothing has been written to any of the disks. I'm currently at my wits' end about what I'll do if I don't manage to recover the data.

I have two 1TB drives and a 2TB. One of the 1TB was the drive I was supposed to be reformatting so nothing to be recovered there. I am currently in a Linux livecd.

In this article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/245725 Microsoft advises to recreate the exact same partition but choose not to format it, and then recover the backup boot sector from the end of the ntfs volume.

But none of the drives I want to recover are bootable drives. So does that mean I do not need to rewrite the boot sector? As in if I simply recreate a partition of the same size it will see all my data?

Or would I be better off using the TestDisk utility? http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

Please help, I'm desperate!!