Hello all,

I was trying to dual-boot ubuntu 11.10 (win 7 64bit native) and in my sleep deprived state deleted an "odd looking" partition from my secondary hdd thinking it was a virus. Of course, it was just for some games I'd installed to that drive but somehow that caused my OS to be completely F###ed to the point that my comp doesn't think there is an OS at all.
I thought it would be no big deal recovering it with testdisk but it hasn't found the missing partition. I did a full search which took several hours but still nothing appeared.
Nothing has been written to the HDD since I deleted the partition (to my knowledge. virus?).

Further info:
- win 7 is installed to an ssd, the partition I deleted was on a secondary hdd. I have 2 hdds and 1 ssd total.
- I keep getting a message in ubuntu "Hard Disk Problems Detected" which pops up about a hundred times in a row, and it says that my SSD is "being used outside design parameters" possibly just because it's an ssd? Or maybe the source of problems?
- I'm running ubuntu 11.10 from a micro-sd usb, as my optical drives won't appear in bios (partly why I thought I had a virus)
- All 3 internal storage devices are on sata3

At the least, can anyone recommend a different program that might work?
Please help me save my baby!

Specs: i7 2600k @ OC'd, Asrock Extreme6 mobo, nVidia GeForce GTX 570, 4x4gb g.skillz ripjaw, OCZ agility 3 SSD, Seagate baracuda green 2tb, Seagate baracuda 1tb (has the deleted partition).

Could any of the issues i've mentioned be the cause of a virus? I'm surprised i'm not getting any feedback at all...

To my knowledge, a virus cannot make your bios show/hide devices. It can only affect the way your OS operates and in some cases alter the contents of your hdd.

Having said that, I think your best bet is to remove that 1TB Seagate drive from your machine, clone it using some sector-by-sector utilities (ie. NOT Ghost) and then connect the clone onto another machine. Then run R-Studio on this other machine and see what it outcomes.
I have a feeling this is motherboard related.

PS. If you insist on working on your own machine, i strongly suggest you turn - off ALL overclockings.

Good luck.

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I agree with the above to clone the drive and do your work on the image. One other suggestion on the problem - I once had a very nasty virus that moved the boot sector by 1. This made the drive unbootable. I used a utility to rebuild the boot sector and recover all data. Don't remember off the top of my head which I used but do a search and you should find one. Good luck.

You could try Active@ Partition Recovery. It succeded for me in similar cases. ...Or manually rewrite partition info with Ranish Partition Manager.