[Bug-ddrescue] I screwed up my gf's PC... please advice

[Thodoris Charalabidis]

Hello there ... This is my first post on this list. Sorry for the long mail.  Please advice me if you think you can help me !!!

I was trying to help a friend of mine recover files from his failing HDD (over the phone), and I heard about ddrescue ...
so I said to first try to learn the syntax of it.... on my girlfriend's pc :-(

So I booted from a live cd and I thought to give ddrescue a try... before helping my friend

I did a "fdisk -l" and it showed me her 1 physical hdd, splitted into 2 partitions (the pc has Windows XP)

something like /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2 . The /dev/sda1 was C (windows, 17 GB) and /dev/sda2 was a DATA partition (no OS, 90 GB)

And then I did a 
ddrescue /dev/sda1 /dev/sda2 logfilename.log   .... for 3 seconds. Just to see if I would get an error ... Only for 3 seconds !!! Then I canceled it (Ctrl-C)

After that I try to find more online examples and I found somewhere that you do that only if the second part of the syntax (/dev/sda2 in my case) is completly EMPTY. Mine wasn't.
So I reboot from the live cd. And boot into Windows. I got a nice blue screen (not a BSOD) stating that my hdd needs to be checked and things like that. I go "Oh Nooooo".
And it started deleting some "orphaned" files, repairing the indexes...etc etc.

After 30 minutes it boots in windows. I browse the 2nd partition. No problem. I could see all the directories. But I then saw that partition D (the /dev/sda2) was not 90 GB but 17 GB. And that 80% of all the PHOTOS she had from our trips and holidays was 0 kb, and I could not open them.

Can you please advice me what to do in order to recover our photos (and maybe the rest of the files) and get the capacity of the partition back ???

Theodoros (sorry for my english... I am from Greece)