How to recover deleted system partition of Windows 7

Question

So before I get to the problem, a little background. My computer is a dell laptop running (well, ran...) Windows 7. I had a problem with the partitioning of drive d. After many unsuccessful attempts I download a software to fix the problem. For some reason, the software started deleting the C drive, which obviously caused a blue screen. From then on, the computer won't boot.

I tried booting through the windows disc, and clicked repair. When it asked me which windows I want to repair it had a list with one item, the windows 7, with a size of 0 MB. I continued to the "System Repair Options"screen and clicked "Startup Repair". The process stuck on an infinite loop, which I can't cancel unless I shut the computer down. I then tried running the command prompt. I typed "C:\", and when I typed the dir command it gave me this message:
"Directory of C:\
File not found"

Needless to say, I really need to recover this drive(it used to be my dad's laptop, a lot of family pictures are in there...), though I'm starting to believe it can't be done. ANY help or a mild breakthrough would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Answer 1

There is no defined straight forward answer on your question, but in general what you need is to use one of the live-bootable operating systems equipped with tools for restoring deleted data and/or partitions. There is no guarantee that you will be able to restore it successfully, but in same time there are chances you will restore good chunk of the data. It depends on your particular scenario.

You can try SystemRescueCD. Download it, make a bootable USB-drive or CD-disk and use provided TestDisk utility.

Here is article about Five free portable recovery tools.

If you really can not afford to lost the data and you are uncertain whether will restore operation succeed - than my advice to you is to ask a professional or experienced person to recover it for you.

General advice in such scenarios - immediately eliminate any write operations to the partition with files which need to be restored.