So here is what happened:
In a hurry to reformat a USB drive I used GParted in Ubuntu 10.10 to reformat my computer's windows hard drive. I deleted the NTFS format and then formatted it to FAT32. After I realized this I turned off the computer and removed the drive, and placed it in a static safe bag. I have purchased a second HD that I plan to use DD to copy the drive to and then work from there. I am hoping that the back up NTFS volume information is still there and that I can use something like TestDisk to restore the back up NTFS volume. Has anyone done this? Or would it be smarted to just use some software to recover the files that I want.