My laptop running Windows Vista had a BSOD so i thought not to worry i'll boot of linux live CD and recover my files.

Boot damn small linux from USB ran gparted and testdisk, came back with 250 bad sectors.

Rebooted only to find that my HDD partition changed from 4GB to 256MB. Thinking - I dont remember formatting the hard drive. Now it boots into Damn Small Linux but still needs the USB key to fully boot. I've used live cd in the past and dont remember it formatiing my HDD. Anyone can shed some light on this?

My question is how do i recover my HDD? I am using Active Data Recovery Software to see if it can find the undeleted partition. It's a work laptop so i tihnk have encryption on it.

Hi, it might be hard to recover everything. If you want to get most of your files back you could try ntfsundelete.
With windows always do a reinstall it's hard to repair and verify that it's actually fixed.

I read your other thread that got closed, and just wanted to clarify something. Are you sure you took the USB drive out before rebooting? Your fdisk output showed your Windows partition still intact, so it doesn't look like your HDD got formatted.

Sorry for the double post, but you may just need to recover your MBR. I believe you can boot off your original Windows install cd, get into system recovery mode (think it's F6), and when you get to a command prompt type 'fixmbr'. Sorry I'm being so vague, but I haven't used Windows in years, so my memory is a little fuzzy.