So here is my (kind of) bad situation. I have this ~640GB Seagate 2.5' HDD. It's and old HDD I was using and it has a lot of important personal data. It used to have a MBR and some Linux partitions, maybe also a couple of NTFS parts (as far as I remmember at a given moment I removed the NTFS partitions and added ext3s).
Anyway the disk had some bad sectors and was totally unbootable. Partitions wouldn't detect etc. etc. I used Hiren's BootCD's Seagate tool - the one from the manufacturer. It found some bad sectors and the realy bad thing I saw right there is that one or two were just over the MBR... I fixed the bad sectors with the tool and of course the MBR was lost forever. This is one of the few drives of mine that use MBR now and it was the only one without an adequate backup MBR backup.
So my question now is how should I go about restoring (guessing) the MBR and the partitions? What are my options?
I've already tried gpart on it with no luck.
I am running testdisk on it now.
I also have the ability to run spinrite6 on it.
Also photorec did start recovering some files but the optimal solution for me would be to get back the structure of the files as well. What shall I do? Any guidelines? My last option is to pay a firm that does this do help but I'd rather try alone first since I do not lack the technical skills. What is your experience in this area?