... for n00bies like me anyway. ^_^ I'm recovering from a hdd partition directly, Fat32, that windows has screwed up. The hdd is physically OK.

Command line linux, and the file system is still a bit fuzzy for me. Using Photorec, I got to the line to select a destination to receive 'recovered' files and had a big d'oh. Obviously I don't want to write to the ramdisk. I didn't know how to get to the right place.

Use the arrow keys to navigate to the double dot (..) lines in the terminal window. Repeatedly until you get to a screen with 'media'.

I put the hhd/partition -to be recovered (from)- on an ide cable, and the destination (hdd) on a usb cable. It's the only usb device on the machine. (noob edit, there _has to be_ a linux formatted partition _on_ the destination drive. Photorec will write to an ntfs directory, but the data is not readable. /noob) I selected USB0 (zero) to receive. Then tick 'Y'.

After Photorec was done, I checked the destination hdd to see what Photorec had found. It was a windows root partition I recovered from so it's full of lots of stuff.

I burned several cds to move the results to my current windows machine. And used tools I was more familiar with to save what I wanted.

...Here's a tutorial, and pictures, that's very handy.
http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntucat/recoverdeletedfiles/