partition recovery tools(free please[broke college dropout])
 

i hope you guys will know what the hell i am talking about, but just like some of the other people on this site, i tried to do something cool and ended up forking my self in the arse. for some reason i started to install linux on a drive, but messed up and did it on my windows drive. thankfuly the instal got botched, so it didnt erase much, but it did really screw me up and make me not be able to get to windows, any ideas?

Hm. I did this before too. Unfortunately the program I used was not free, but it worked nice: Ontrack's EasyRecovery. It didn't rewrite my partition table (since I hadn't saved it before hand), but it DID allow me to recover all (or most) of my files to another drive.

Maybe take a look at <a href="http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/">UBCD</a>. It may come with some tools for this purpose. It would help if you knew the exact locations of your partitions, then it's simply a matter of redefining them.

As a first resort though, I recommend booting with your Windows CD and going to the recovery console. Then I think typing fixmbr or fixboot or similar would at least reinstate the windows bootloader, just in case that's all that got destroyed.

UBCD is awesome.. several recovery utils on there.

Also.. do a search before you start a thread.. there are several threads similar to this.

sorry about not searching. also, i would love to put in my win cd, but we will just call it missing for now.....wink wink

Boot up with a LiveCD, like Knoppix, but anything will do. Mount your NTFS/FAT32 partition (if possible), and back up the data you want, then just wipe the partition. That's what I'd do in your case.