this tutorial was from cgsecurity.org about how to use testdisk and photorec that i found here at this forum. here is the steps i exactly did.

i turned on my pc, loged into the system using my user name.
went to the konsole and typed photorec.
message came up saying maximize terminal window cuz photorec needs at least 21 lines to operate. so i maixmized the window.
photorec told me to select drive, so i selected my 30gb drive that had 28.8gb free space on it
next it said choose partition type so i selected intel/pc becasue its not a mac partition.
then it brought up the screen that said this on it

Disk /dev/hda -30GB

Partition start end size in sectors

D empty whole disk
1 * linux
2 P linux
3 P linux

i would write the numbers down but im not sure if they are the same as they where before the catastrophic event.
so i selected the D empty partiton and then hit search. after that it got about half way threw the disk, maybe a lil more and thats when the error came up. im thinkin that it recovered 28.8 gb of deleted files and stored them on my drive and now i have to go in and delete them. but the tutorial said that photorec would never ever write to the HDD and so i emailed the dude who created the program and his responses are very limited and vague. here is his response to my issue

Looks like you haven't used the good program:
- PhotoRec is designed to recover lost files,
- TestDisk to recover lost partitions.

Bye,
Christophe

how is that supposed to help me. lol. any way thats the steps i took to kill my system. my box wont even let me run knoppix off cd any more. i select cd rom as my boot device in bios and also during post but the grub loader keeps coming up saying i need to select one of these two os's to continue. niether of them are the cd. any way thanx in advance and in the meant time im gonna try just login into debian text from the grub and see if i can view me HDD