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A while ago, i was using my laptop to try to recover a partition off another harddrive. I am not sure how that went but later i discovered that my attempts ended up deleting the DATA partition on my laptop. I had some acronis disk director thing that let me know that at least i still had all the data on the disk and i just need to somehow restore the partition.

Ok i thought, I did this before sucessfully a while ago (BTW Big thanks to TGC forum for helping me out back then as that was pretty much my first custumer on a new job i got and if i accedentally managed to delete his partition with data on it and if it wasnt for you guys i might have been fired).

Altho i dont really remember how i did it, today afyter 2 months i finally got around to trying to restore my lost partition. This ended badly as, in attempting to do so i ended up damaging my system partition as well.

I tried fixing that with some outdated recovery software i had most of which is dos based anyway. (and i have win 7)

long story short, i ended up accedentally eracing the master boot record to 0 and now, i am not even sure how to restore that. infact i am not even sure if the data is even recovarable or if i can even restore the partion tables.

So im gonna keep trying to save my data, but if anyone has any ideas or knows some good software for this thing feel free to pitch in,

if i manage to fix this, i will tell you guys how i did it for the hope that someone might find my experience with these screwups useful.

i've had issues before where I have had to delete the partitions and file system then recreate them. I could still get most* of my data back.

*(I had no choice but to install os and recovery software onto the same hard drive)

I used data recovery wizard pro

for recreating partitions I still use good ol fdisk. if you cant take the drive out and put it in another pc, i suggest getting yourself a small freeware os that you can run from a flash drive and using that to load fdisk. just go into bios and change the startup drive to your flash drive, load the os and run fdisk. so long as you dont full format the disc your data loss should be minimal.

Me too! I still have a floppy drive and use my old win98 boot disk whenever I need to repartition my hard drive!!

I think i have "Data Recovery Wizard" somewhere on one of my Live CD Disks. I guess they serve the same purpose as flash boot disks with linux as i have a few Live CDs with Unix based OSs on them.

I am still trying all the Live CDs programs i have (my old job gave me tons of these with all kinds of diagnostic software)

For now, hooking up to a computer is somewhat of a last resort because i cant even really acess my files and I am not even sure if repairing a partion will restore acess to my data after all the crap i tried that didnt work. Might have actually made it worse.

I appologize in advance for the double post

I Did it! I think i recovered both partitions.

I had to take out the HDD from the laptop and hook it up to the desktop.

The System partition was recovered using Active@ partition recovery.
It took about 2 hours to scan it after which it managed to restore the partition tables and restored free access to the files on Drive C:\

The Data partition was a bit more screwed up (its the one i originaly broke). I tried the free version of EASEUS partition recovery and this software managed to restore acess to the data partition. but again, it took a while to scan the drive.

http://www.easeus.com/download.htm

That link has the list of all the data/ratition software some of which is freeware and if it worked for me i am sure many might find this software useful.

What puzzles me is when i did this kind of thing a while ago, i dont remember scanning the harddrive, There was something like "rebuild partition tables" and it instantly fixes or rebuilds the partition without having to scan the HDD for 2 hours.

Looks like luck is on my side Once again.
after i restored acess to the drives, the only thing that was left was the unbootable windows 7 since i completley erased MBR and boot record and i thought the system needed some image of both of to properly restore them so they work with windows loader. So far, my laptop acted as if the disk didnt exist. I tried using Windows 7 install disk to do a system repair.
Now i never trusted programs that claim they can scan your system and locate and repair any error they encounter. In the past these kinds of "smart repair" apps, never really repaired anything, and i always had to do everything manually (Well manually didnt always work too infact like recentley my manual attempts often made things worse).
That was in the days before windows 7.

Windows 7 ability, to repair itself and recover from some really bad problems with the OS surprised me in the past. So i decided to try it. After 15 minutes of scanning, i gave up thinking no way Windows knows how to recover from what i did inless it can accuratley rewrite boot sector and MBR which didnt even exist because i eraced them and the windows boot loader couldnt even find find the harddrive since there was no MBR or boot sector before i loaded it off the Win7DVD and did sytem repair thing.

After 20 minutes of "automatic system search & repair"
The boot sector restored, MBR rewritten, and the thing loads windows like nothing even happened and Both partitions on the HDD working and all the files still there and undamaged.

Once again, Microsoft dosent cease to amaze me.
On ythe other hand the many idiot-prrof layer of Win7 for jackasses like myself Do make me lazy and eventually force me to forget how to fix certain problems that i had to do by hand on windows XP. With Win7, i never really have to fix everything because nothing ever seemes to be broken.

I actually thought i will have to move all the data from the laptop and reinstall windows again, but seemes windows7 is amazing at repairing itself

good stuff man, glad you got it sorted.

Thanks for the lead on the recovery software btw, Its not the same program but a free version of that recovery wizard, saved my other partition

I realized this a while ago but i am gonna say it anyway.

Fixing computers is my best skill. But i totally suck at it
Good thing, most of my screwups were close calls, like the time after i cleamed the heatsink and applied fresh thermal paste to my friends 8800 GTX (who loves that GPU to death) I forgot to hook up the fan to the card resulting in really horrible overheating of that card like it even melted some of the plastic.

I still have hard time believing that the card survived this. And this was the first impression of my 1337 computer skillz my friend witnessed as at the time we just met each other.

What i find even more surprising is despite almost frying and likley decreasing the lifespan of the dudes most prized posession in his computer, HE STILL TRUSTS ME TO FIX HIS COMPUTER HARDWARE PROBLEMS more than himself even tho he clearly knows more than enough to build himself a desktop as he originally built the desktop with the 8900GTX i almost burned! For some reason he is still very afraid of poking around the hardware area of computers.

Then again, one day when i took apart his computer and realized just how bad he screwed up assembling his mashine. He didnt use correct standup screws, The heatsink was dangerously loose, Half of the backside of his motherboard was screwed flat against metal backside of the case because he didnt use standup screwes, istead he used the standups as regular screws screwing half of the motherboard flat against the metal, The sound card was not even held in place and constantly coming loose, it was horrifying i almost killed him for it and barred him from even opening the case without my supervision (how did his motherboard not short-circut?.... that still puzzles me)

But i shouldnt be talking as i have my own share of dumb screwups with computer hardware.

fdisk /mbr to fix the master boot record

when data is erased from a hdd it isn't actually erased.
Just the first pointer to the first bit of the file is erased. All the data on the disk is recoverable with the correct tools as long as you don't write anything else to the disk.

Glad to read you got your sorted

youp youre right^ big thanks to windows 7's ability to automatically repair itself. I never believed any of those automated diagnostic and repair, during the win XP era that kind of stuff never did anything everythiing ended in "contact yuor administrator" Win 7 actually does something. after i somehow restored the partition and data, win 7s autorepair finished the job restoring everything to how it was with no problems or damaged files.