Hi,

A friend of mine brought me a disk which used to contain a Windows Vista system (let's guess it was 1 ntfs partition). But now, when I try to have a look at the disk with a partition editor, it says it is un-partitioned, and actually that the disklabel is missing.

Is there any way I can save some of the data currently on the disk (but directly obviously un-acessible)?

I can think of 2 ideas:
Is there a way to repair / recreate a disklabel without loosing the data?
Is there a way to read the data without using a filesystem? Perhaps in the way people sometimes manage to read deleted data from a disk as long as it has not been overwritten?

Thanks in advance for any help!

Take a look at something like Helix or Backtrack2. What you are referring to is forensics work. There is also a tool somewhere to repair partition tables, might be on one of the live distros I mentioned.