Moral of this story is "don't format pc when still tired!! " this morning I formatted my pc for a fresh install of xp but mistakingly deleted the partition for my second drive that I use for storage... I didn't create another partition on that drive because I want to retreive the data off it first but as you may know, no partition/no drive letter, the data is still on the drive but cannot be accessed due to the lack of drive letter, is there any proccess or software that will detect the drive and retreive data off it? p.s I have already been to disk management but because the volume is unalocated when right clicked it just shows "new partition/Properties"

when a partition is deleted it also deletes any data in that partition, there are recovery methods as noted in this Google search http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=data+recovery

Actually, the data's still there, especially since you had the good sense not to create a new partition. Almost any software recovery suite should be able to recover most (and probably all) of your data.

http://www.runtime.org/gdb.htm

chears all, I tryed various trial software which found the partition but didn't recover it because they were trial so I tryed partition magic and hazaa it recovered it, thanks again :-)