Parted (what gparted uses for partition table manipulation) doesn't touch NTFS at all so it can't destroy it. What it did was that it changed the NTFS partition start to an incorrect place in the partition table, so it became completely inaccessible.
Unfortunately neither gparted nor testdisk can still find the NTFS partition reliable, so I wrote a simple utility two years ago which finds all possible real partition starts. It worked fine in the past for everybody. It can be downloaded from: http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/findntfs-1.3.tgz -- Partition table destroyed when resizing NTFS https://launchpad.net/bugs/48229 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
