Well, I screwed up and lost a ton of data (pics of kids, checkbook data, emails...)
I put in my Linspire 5.0 disc in to upgrade my 4.5 verion and rebooted. Well, low and behold it started installing a new system... overwriting the old one... I have words for such things. This is part of the reason folks do NOT like Linux! It is not super easy to use and it is not Dummy proof! Yes, it is my fault for not backing up all my data, but still. I have recovered some and the hard drive still has the data written on it (see below for more info) but I am not very happy with Linux so far. I am not ready to go back and totally use Windows, but I am not far off from it. It also depends on what Vista is like when it comes out.
I found a nice disto disck called Smart Linux here:
http://www.asrdata2.com/
Although you have to purchase the version, which gives you all the recovery tools, it did allow me to view the hex data on the disc and verify that there is still a little bit left over from before.
Therefore I went a head and swapped my (previously unused) second drive for the first, and setup a new installation on the first drive. I also setup MS Win2k first and then installed Kubuntu instead of the damndable Linspire disc, which was part of my problem in the first place (at least I like to think that way). Now I have dual boot setup and I expect to be able to install a few other distros on a couple of other partations soon. This will also allow me to use the computer and recover the data at my leisure.
Thanks for all the help (those that helped) and here are a few other nice links for data recovery / forensics...
Knoppix distro - http://s-t-d.org/index.html
testdisk as previously mentioned
http://www.linux-forensics.com/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1
A program for rescue - http://jbj.rapanden.dk/magicrescue/
I suppose y'all already knew some of this though.
Now if I could just get GNUCash setup or something equivalent installed on Kubuntu...
