Recovering deleted partition and data

[guhanath]

Hi,

One of my friend has a Dell Inspiron laptop. He had the following partitions C,D,E,F with some valuable data in other partitions except C.
Recently he faced a problem with media direct buttons in the laptop and its relative driver dlls, which corrupted the OS stability.
He reinstalled the OS by formatting the C Drive alone. After the OS loaded he could see only 2 partition listed in the explorer.

C: - Unpartitioned Space(96GB)
D: - Dell Media Direct.

What could be the problem and how can he recover the deleted partitions and data from it?

[realdan]

things are not specified clearly
like
the size of hdd
i think system restore in dell allowed one to backup files and that should be attempted before simply formatting the C drive alone.
well before writing more...be more clear in the spec and what was attempted..like did he use the vista disc to install the OS or use the media direct this to start the install..etc