Recovering photos from a former NTFS partition, now ext3

Question

I installed Ubuntu 11.04 on an old laptop. It turns out that there were some photos on the old windows xp install. The owner has given up on them, but I'd like to recover as many photos as I can as a pleasant surprise. Is there a good tool for this, and how would I use it, considering that that the partition is no longer formatted as NTFS? ( I suppose a direct scan of the entire disk would be needed )

Answer 1

I'm going to answer myself in case anyone needs reference.

After some minor research I've had success using foremost with the ubuntu live cd, and have recovered many photos.

Since foremost is filesystem-agnostic and scans the disk directly, it doesn't matter that I've replaced my ntfs partition with ext3

Instructions for using foremost and other data recovery programs with the ubuntu live cd can be found here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DataRecovery