Vista SP2 has mae its way onto my machine finally... Flight Simulator still wont install, and had some trouble with Visual Studio 2008, however got enough of that on that I can be productive.....
Anyhow, during the course of my re-install of Vista I managed to mess up my MBR such that my data partition disappeared... OK I know I should have had a real backup, rather than copying to a partition on the same drive, but I didn't...
Where this gets interesting is in the recovery...I needed an application that could simply write an MBR, because I knew the data and the partition descriptors were all fine...
There seems to be a number of tools on the market, and none offer a 'find partition and re-write mbr entry'... most copied data of the 'damaged partition'... The best (and simplest) of these was Find And Mount, which does exactly what it says, finds partitons, and mounts them (as read only drives - and free version has a transfer speed limit). The particular feature I used however, was that it could tell what the starting sector of the partition was...
Using the starting sector and the capacity, I could tell the ending sector... this enabled me to use dtidata_partition_repair_tool, which is an mbr editor (and can make your pc unbootable if your're not careful) Using this, I could reinsert the entry for my data partition, and without even rebooting, windows scanned for the new partitions and found it, all my data safe and well!
I have no affiliation with the makers of
dtiData_partition_repair_tool
or
Find And Mount
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