Partitioning Peril

Knoppix is the favourite Live distro so far.
Though, it has the distinction of royally screwing up the partitions on my drive making a few GBs of downloaded content inaccessible. The excess of options are interesting, but if two tools for the same job offer contrasting solutions, the user (ignorant user) is left in limbo, or worse, as in my case in loss.
Gparted and Qtparted were two tools offered by Knoppix to deal with partitions. Since I already had Mandriva on the drive, I knew the partition numbers and this allowed me to conclude that Gparted was showing the proper layout. The layout had hda1 as a primary, hda2 as extended which contained hda3, hda5, hda7 and hda9. When viewed in Qtparted, the partitions were shown as hda1 to hda6. Hda7 and 9 contained data, and after I formatted and recreated hda5 to install knoppix, the data in 7 and 9 was gone. The partitions were there, the size was reported correctly, but the contents were missing - only a lost+found folder remained.

Data recovery options are limited, especially thanks to the limited knowledge about the file systems themselves. An online search revealed the presence of two free tools - Rtools, and Diskrecovery (or something similar). Diskrecovery scanned a partition and showed a bunch of image files and nothing else, though there were about a few hundred nested empty folders "recovered" as well. R tools did worse, just returning the Lost+Found folder. TestDisk is an excellent partition table tool, but it couldn't help me this time (it had saved my data many times previously with Windows partitions) since the partitions were intact.

A few enquiries online suggested using the fsck tool, which was inbuilt, could help. But, I saw no benefit in using it. A write off is imminent.

The lesson to be learnt is avoid Qtparted and ergo Knoppix installation.