Hello, I thought I'd install Ubuntu 10 on my laptop today and I've done something very silly.

I accidentally overwrote an NTFS partition containing data as the Linux swap partition during installation (I thought it was just going to put a swap FILE on it!).

Any ideas how I might be able to fix this, or at least get at some of the data?

Making it an NTFS partition again without formatting and then running random windows data recovery tool might work.
Depends on how much you have ran linux after installing it. If you never booted up i don't think any actual data have been written to the partition and it don't format it when it creates the SWAP so you might have some luck getting the data back.

Thanks Erik. I didn't realise what I'd done until after I booted into it. I've tried a couple of things. testdisk was the most helpful, but it wasn't enough.

Ah well, I learned quite a lot today :-P