[RESOLVED] Gateway laptop lost partitions

I was installing XP 64bit onto my Gateway T1620 lappy (as a 3rd OS) when the GUI portion of the install wouldn't fire up. I got an error message about hard drive configuration.

So I booted to a LiveCD linux distro to use GPartEd to activate either my other XP installation or my Windows 7 so I'd have an OS I could use for the night.

Cutting to the chase, GPartEd shows a clean hard drive with no partitions. Oooopsie!!.....

But, if I boot to the XP 64 installation USB stick, it sees the partitions.

Basically I've got, (or I had), 3 primary partitions with 3 or 4 logical partitions on this drive.

So anyway, I've somehow buggered the MBR or the Partition Table. So if anyone has any suggestions how I should proceed, I'd appreciate it.

The truth is, everything that's really important is backed up on an external hard drive, so worst comes to worst, I'm in good shape. However, I've got a lot of useless cr*p on those partitions I'd like to get back.....LOL

OTOH, I could look at this as an unintended "cleaning" of a rather over stuffed 250G hard drive. And at this point, I can hardly do anymore damage....lol

Installing an older OS on a pc that has a newer OS like Win7 is tricky...Win7's boot manager (like vista's) is a whole new animal.....

The following might help to get access to the two original OS's....
VistaBootPRO
http://www.vistabootpro.org/

A repair install of Win7 might also help.

Steve, thanks for the reply. I multi-boot by hiding/unhiding primary partitions so I don't have problems/concerns/issues with boot loaders or installing in any particular order.

Anyway, after a few hours of trying windows based programs, I went for a linux program called "testdisk" running on a live LinuxMint USB stick. An extremely fast program compared to windows apps. It was able to "see" the lost partitions in just a few seconds, then it wrote the info to the HD, then a reboot and done!

So I've got everything recovered and all I had to do after the fact was adjust the partition letters.

Sounds interesting!
Per chance you have a link?

Train, TestDisk is offered thru the software repositories for Ubuntu and some other distros based on Ubuntu.

So I just had to do a "sudo apt-get install testdisk" command to download and install it in LinuxMint live USB.

Here's a tutorial on how to use TestDisk:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step

Also, both LinuxMint and Ubuntu and some others offer a simple tool to create live USB's directly from the live CD's. USB's advantage over CD's is it's somewhat writeable.

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/ubuntu-...usb-installer/

Thank you very much!

I will follow this up in a few days!