i recently installed fedora on my machine to try it out, when i did, i  
resized my ubuntu partition(foolishly and lazily i was jsut using one  
big partition instead of separate ones for /home etc).it's grub menu  
for some unknown reason didnt show my old ubuntu install, but i  
thought nothing of it.

anyway, i hadnt needed to access my old partition for anything until  
yesterday, and when i tried to mount it, it wouldnt. i kept getting an  
error about the filesystem beign bigger than the device...no stress i  
thought, ill load a live cd, delete this new fedora partition and  
resize the previous one (seemed logical enough at the time) long story  
short, after several failed installs and resizes, it still wanst  
mounting.

some time later i was somehow(for no reason i understand) able to  
mount it (from the live cd) and to my dismay, there doesnt seem to be  
much of anything on it (no /home with all my photos and homework from  
the last 2 years anyway) i get /bin /usr /lib, some others and a "lost  
and found" which is empty.

if anyone knows anything about what steps i should take next, or a  
point in the right direction to do some reading (it looks like i  
should try somethign called ddrescue to make an image of the disk but  
im somewhat confused as to how thats going to work and whats going on  
there)

ive never really had to worry about recovering files from a disk  
before so im pretty lost

ugh!
-chris