Repair broken partition table

I'm a linux user. For whatever reason I installed windows XP. Everything went great, however, by mistake I pressed "L" to delete the partition on a very important external USB drive. I forgot I had it plugged in and mistook it for my computers internal drive.

ANYWAY, I didn't format it, I just deleted the partition.

I tried using testdisk, but it's not repairing the table (I must be doing it wrong).

It gave me an offer to back up my data but I don't have any drives at the moment big enough to transfer the 500gigs.

I've googled, I've youtubed, I'm stuck. Does anyone know how to fix this ?

12 hour bamup

http://www.partition-recovery.com/ you lamefag

Usually you'd format such a disk with one partition, spanning the entire drive. So re-create that, set flag to 95 extended and try and mount it.