LiveCD wiping root partition?

I just did a clean install of Fedora 7 from the live CD onto my laptop, which previously had a Fedora install upgraded from one of the F7 test releases, partitioned as suggested by anaconda (LVM, one swap partition, everything else under '/') When reinstalling, I kept the partition layout and specifically told Anaconda *not* to reformat / (having booted in rescue mode beforehand, and removing everything but /home). Anaconda gave a warning that the leftover files might interfere with the installed system, which gave the impression that those files won't actually be removed during installation. As it turns out, however, the old contents are completely gone (I'm trying out different recovery tools now to see if I could rescue some of the data). It's as if the live CD simply used dd to transfer the install image to the hard drive (in which case, how does it actually handle different partition layouts, e.g. /usr, /var, /home on separate partitions -- does it just move the files afterwards?) As it stands it seems that the Live CD is a very dangerous tool, at least as long as 1) the default behaviour of Anaconda is to put everything under / 2) it does not carry more warnings about what it will do to the / partition during installation Could someone let us know how the live CD actually performs its work? It would aid tremendously in the data recovery part. Would 'dd'-ing the entire partition to an external drive, and mounting it on a Windows computer (most recovery tools are unfortunately for that platform) preserve all the data required? I'm assuming that the new installation overwrote the same parts of the disk that was used to hold the OS in the previous install. Thanks, -- Michel