qtparted is dangerous - beware.
Posts: 30
I'll be brief.
I created (squeezed in) 3 more logical partitions, carefully selected them for formatting and qtparted erroneously formatted the last (right-most in the diagram) partition (I think it was hda9). Luckily most of it was ROMs and backed-up important work, but there were some <= 8 year old pictures and registered win32 software which is now gone.
Please BACKUP before using qtparted. It is not reliable enought to trust with your important data.
I've installed MEPIS now
Posts: 30
Thanks Jim for the help 
I think I had gone past the stage of retrieving anything anyway and possibly it was not such a bad thing purging me of accumulated relatively unimportant data. Still, what you've posted will be of use to others in the future.
For future reference :-
I've installed MEPIS now. It is not required to pre-format any partitions created for the hard disk install as the MEPIS installation procedure does it, so maybe I would have been OK if I'd understood that from the outset.
I've been using the GParted Live CD quite happily for managing partitions and although nothing is 100% safe, I haven't had any problems with it yet.
Regards.
It's Probably Recoverable
Posts: 1109
It's a good idea to reboot before going any futher, anytime you make a change to your partitions.
But, the partition is probably recoverable (or at least the data files on it), providing you haven't overwritten it with any new data yet.
Try testdisk (it's in the repositories and you can install it via Synaptic). It saved my rear recently.
While I was half asleep and experimenting with diifferent MBR types on a CompactFlash Card using Ranish Parition Manager, I removed the existing partitions on my primary hard disk drive instead, overwrote it's Master Boot Record, created a new Partition, and started formatting it before I realized that the wrong drive was selected (I didn't notice the extra decimal places in the drive size until it was too late). I've got to pay attention to those little details.
It was my primary hard disk drive with Windows XP and lots of important files on it, versus the CompactFlash Card I was experimenting with. Big OOPS!
Well, I booted into a Linux Live CD (I think I used Kanotix, but I may have used SimplyMEPIS), installed TestDisk, and managed to recover the NTFS partition on the drive, with no loss of data. I did need to recreate the MBR using fixmbr from an XP CD. But, the NTFS partition survived my mistakes intact, thanks to testdisk.
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
If you can't get the partition back intact, you can probably get the important pictures you had on it (formatting doesn't actually overwrite the data). Try PhotoRec (from the same author that developed TestDisk).
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec
Jim C.