In my experience partition recovery programs are hit and miss at best. Standard undelete programs wont work since it the partition doesn't actually exist anymore. It's just looking at unformatted space.

saba: I don't see what could have happened if you're definitely sure the shell didn't find the program. If it did and it formatted the drive, then only the program can notify you, not Kubuntu itself since it's just a distribution.

Good luck with it.