I was fixing a customer's PC when I decided that using the recovery disc would be smart, but wrong, it went and wiped the whole partition table without even telling me. It took a matter of seconds, so obviously the data is still there, just not linked to any partition.

Anyone know of a free program that will enable me to rebuild the partition table based on the data? I don't know the cylinders and such so I can't do a raw partitionning either. Searching on google for such tools is a piss off because all of them are advertised as free then I go to download it and it's a pesky demo that only lets you see the data.

So any help would be apreciated thanks!

Exactly what I need... but it's only a demo...

Ok. maybe another is better...

That's a demo too...

I wiped out my partition table once. I used gpart to get it back. To my amazement it worked. I booted up damnSmall Linux and then mounted the floppy drive (where gpart was located) I ran the command gpart and it guessed my partition table. I then wrote the partition table and all was good.

Also, (and I learned this tha hard way) it's a good idea to make a backup of the partition table and the MBR just in case something like this happens. If you are running win 2000 or XP there is a program called diskprobe that can make a copy of your partition table and MBR
(the first 512k of the HDD). disk probe is part the win 2000 support tools. Aditionally, I'm sure there are propably 101 ways to copy your partition table and MBR using GNU/Linux

It's for linux though... I need something that I can put on a disk and boot from, if I start making partitions and installing stuff such as linux I'll risk the data...

Seems you have a real challenge then... but maybe that one's better...

No, it's not just for linux. Go to the site. It is compatible with many filesystems. In my case I restored the partition table on my HDD that was a fat32 filesystem. You jsut need a bootable linux distro (like Knoppix or DamnSmall Linux) to run it.

I had a similar problem two days ago. I used something called testdisk, which I think is free. It worked perfectly.

Also, if you want to "put it on a disk', you could burn a knoppix disc. If you mean a floppy, I think you can get boot floppies for linux out there somehwere. I know you can still get dos boot disks so i would think there'd be linux too.

Testdisk seems to work, it rewrote the partition information. Only one problem, it did not recover any files, it just recreated new raw partitions. If I try to access it just says "invalid media type". It did recover the labels and all though... is there maybe a way to get it to read as FAT16 and FAT32? (the first was FAT16, the other was FAT32) It reconized them as those file systems but for some reason it did not write it properly as I can't do anything.

Partition magic found an error and fixed it, now I only have a C drive (I made it D and created a blank C, so it's no big deal) but I can see files and I think I'll be good. Thanks everyone for the help! I'll keep this util on a disk!

By the way, while were at it, is there any free file recovery utils that will run in dos? Might as well have that on the disk too. I have a business so I think I'll eventually need it anyway.