This is turning into a nightmare - following my initial recovery of my two partitions, I went to install Xubuntu 12.10 (again). At this time I had two partitions - one of ~39 GB had Zorin OS 6 installed on it, and another of ~33 GB had nothing installed, just a few files in it that I had manually backed up (moved) there. When I got to the partitioning step, I chose "Replace Zorin OS 6 with Xubuntu 12.10", along with LVM, naturally thinking that the installer wouldn't touch the second partition, since Zorin wasn't installed on it.

I was dead wrong. Upon booting my newly installed Xubuntu 12.10, I found in gparted that there were only two partitions - ~255MB, which appears to have the boot stuff in it (it's flagged boot in gparted), and another of ~74 GB.

Question: Is there any way to salvage my old files on the non-Zorin ext3 partition?

I'm really upset I made such a dumb move (again...), and any and all help is appreciated very, very much!