So last night, in attempts to dual-boot Vista alongside Windows 7 RC, I used EASUS Partition Master to attempt to shrink my full-disk partition in order to make room for a Windows 7 partition. After about an hour in the EASUS boot-up application (that was supposed to perform the actual data moving and repartitioning) the process failed at some point while I was not at the computer. I walked into the room to be greeted with a No Operating System Found message during boot.
My disk is now, apparently, 500GB of an unknown/broken file system format. The Vista/Windows7 boot disk cannot identify any windows installations on the hard disk and GParted Live just identifies the partition as unknown.
Do I have any options available to me for partition recovery, besides the typical OMG I Formatted my Drive data recovery tools.
Is there a way to could tell if the broken partition still has a valid NTFS master file table or something similar that could help me recover?
Update
For the life of me, I couldn't forcefully mount the broken partition in Knoppix, so I used the bundled tool TestDisk and muddled around enough to the point where I could run CHKDSK /R in the recovery console of a Vista Boot disk. CHKDSK is fixing lots of stuff. Not sure what will happen once this process completes.
Update 2
After CHKDSK, I simply force mounted the partition within Knoppix with the command
mount -t ntfs dev/sda1 disk -o force
This put the drive in a state where I could identify and backup data from the device.