How to revover using Data Recovery software n Linux (ubuntu 12.10 and older version)

 Recover data in Linux platform

The other day a friend of mine wiped out his harddisk,while "ATTEMPTING" to dual boot his machine with Suse Enterprise 11,he almost cried his heart out.we had quite a tweaky weekend that turned out to be a fun afterall.we recovered 99.99999% of the data....!!
Thanks to debian.

Our tools included:
A debian Live cd.
Internet or optionally the Testdisk package.
Frugal
Scalpel
the instructions are quite simple....

Run Testdisk as root
vinay:~#sudo testdisk

Recovering your files,the fun part
PhotoRec
Of the three tools we’ll show, PhotoRec is the most user-friendly, despite being a console-based utility. To start recovering files, open a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and type in

vinay~#sudo photorec

Scalpel
Scalpel is a powerful program that, like Foremost, is heavily configurable. Unlike Foremost, Scalpel requires you to edit a configuration file before attempting any data recovery.
Any text editor will do, but we’ll use gedit to change the configuration file. In a terminal window (Applications > Accessories > Terminal), type in:

sudo gedit /etc/scalpel/scalpel.conf

scalpel.conf contains information about a number of different file types. Scroll through this file and uncomment lines that start with a file type that you want to recover (i.e. remove the “#” character at the start of those lines).
Save the file and close it. Return to the terminal window.
Scalpel also has a ton of command-line options that can help you search quickly and effectively; however, we’ll just define the input device (/dev/sda) and the output folder (a folder called “scalpel” that we created on the desktop).
Our invocation is:

sudo scalpel /dev/sda –o scalpel

These tools are lifesavers when something goes wrong with your hard drive. If your data is on the hard drive somewhere, then one of these tools will track it down!