Wow, this is embarrassing... Well, it seems that I have managed to really screw up my 160GB hard drive that contained every bit of my 33GB music collection. I already posted this on another forum hoping to get some help, but since HA is one of the best online communities I've come across, I thought I would post it here as well. Here's what happened:

I run Windows XP, and have dual booted with linux in the past (though I was just running XP about a week ago, when all this happened). When the new Ubuntu came out (6.06), I heard a lot of good things about it and wanted to try it out for myself.

I had about ~25GB of unpartitioned space on my drive at this point, so I installed Ubuntu there. Long story short, after installing Ubuntu, GRUB kept giving me error messages and I couldn't boot to either Windows or Ubuntu. Anyway, I ended up giving up on it and decided it was going to be more trouble than it was worth. I wiped out my ext3 and swap partitions, and couldn't remember how to get rid of GRUB (I think last time I stopped using linux I actually did a fresh Windows install...).

Ok now. Before these next few steps I checked to make sure all my files were still there. They were.

So I got online and googled "uninstall GRUB." After reading a few forums, it seemed like it was really simple: just "fdisk /mbr".... WRONG. After reading some more, it seemed like another option was to put in a Windows install disk, go to recovery mode, and type "fixmbr." Supposedly these commands wouldn't touch my partition table or mess with my data.

GREAT, now when I try to boot the computer just says "Invalid Partition Table..." I figure "Oh well, guess I'll just have to copy all my music over to another hard drive." Not quite. Now all the data on the drive is inaccessible. Nothing can show the contents of the drive. Heck, nothing can even really recognize the partitions.

I ran the CD that came with the hard drive and it sees three partitions (which is good, I hope), but it says they are about 80GB, 900GB, and 0MB in size, which is obviously incorrect. It is unable to ghost them or anything because it shows them as unknown filesystems (the first one that I need should be NTFS).

What is confusing to me is that the drive was never formatted or anything during this process. All I did was 'fdisk /mbr' and 'fixmbr' and now the whole drive seems to be lost...

I know what you're thinking. "Wow, what an idiot. Didn't you back it up??? You deserve to lose it!" Actually, I had it all backed up on another 40GB drive. By some freak occurance that I will not go into, it was wiped clean... So here I am. If anyone has ANY idea of what I can do to get my files back, PLEASE reply... I don't have the time to re-rip my whole collection (about half my CDs are damaged or lost by now anyway). Any help is greatly appreciated.

Take your hard disk to a repair shop that does data restoration and knows what they're doing. If you wish to do this yourself you'll have to download or buy some data restoration software.

Try GetDataBack for NTFS.

I once wiped out the partition of my un-backed-up hard disk and managed to recover all files.

But you need 2 hard disk: 1 is your zonked hard disk, and the other is a WinXP booting hard disk big enough to copy your data there.

OK thanks for the advice guys. I had a feeling that even the off-topic board here at HA would be more helpful than most other places... I'm trying to do this the right way because I haven't found a way to ghost the disk so it looks like I only have one more shot.

I'm not sure if we have a repair shop that does data restoration around here (I live in a small city), but I'll look around and until then I guess I'll look into GetDataBack and other data restoration software... if I end up recovering this I'm planning on having at least two backups!

I forgot the link for GetDataBack:

http://www.runtime.org/gdb.htm

Good on the GetDataBack website they cleary warn about not putting anything on the hard disk that you're attempting to restore files from.

What about the ubuntu cd? It has a live mode you could use to check if the partitions are really screwed up. If you can browse to your music directory, you can easily restore it, either by copying it to another partition or by burning it into a DVD.

Problem solved!!!

GetDataBack recovered (as far as I can tell) 100% of my files! Thanks to everyone, especially pepoluan, for the suggestions!

Glad to hear you can get all your files

Some of them may still be damaged though, so you'll have to check each and everyone. The damage is usually non-reparable, because the sector on the file is overwritten somehow. Which is why the GetDataBack website warns not to write anything on the drive being recovered.

Hmmm... the newest version of GDB (3.x) seems to be a lot easier to use than mine (2.64)... I think I will upgrade, just in case...

I'm cautiously optimistic that most of my files aren't damaged because after the drive got wiped, I immediately removed it (the drive I recovered my files from was actually a backup that was accidentally fdisk'd) .... it was a very strange situation

I was able to use a batch file written by Synthetic Soul to verify that my lossless files were not damaged, and only one was corrupt (I am re-ripping the disc as I speak). Hopefully not too many of my lossy files were damaged during the process... at this point I am just going to be satisfied knowing that my lossless copies are OK, and if I have problems with the lossy songs, I'll just have to encode them again.

Good to hear... hopefully no irreplaceable tracks are missing.

I accidentally deleted such a track so now I always install Norton Utilities Protected Recycle Bin, no matter how I hate the later NU versions to pay a lot of moolahs just for one utility oh well...