I then pressed the option to install Fedora to the Laptop's HDD hoping it would jolly things along a little.

Now, like a moron, I was frustrated that the process was slow since the HP continually accessed the CD. Having booted fedora on the HP from the CD, I plugged in the external drive and to my complete shock, the drive mounted and the complete folder structure was there, in tact, and ready to copy onto the Qnap (with a new 1TB drive). Next I changed the properties of the 'damaged' partition to make it bootable using testdisk. If anyone else is going to try this, create an image of the disk BEFORE you do anything else. These were found quickly and whilst I could see the folder structures and files, when recovering I only got a about 10-20% of the data.

Next I ran Testdisk and searched for the lost partitions. Strangely Fedora did not run on either of my dell machines but did on an HP laptop. I followed some sage advice and bought an external case, new HDD and downloaded a copy of Fedora 10 Live. I thought I would update you on my 'experiences' (and please bear in mind that I am pretty illiterate with these things).

Testdisk fedora