Windows 7 System Reserved Partition

there are a few free and paid hard drive recovry programs out there. the problem right now is windows blew the partion info off the drive. the software going to have to rebuild or recover it if it can. im more of a hardware person by try and see on windows forum if ms has a tool to undo what was done. a lot of people post on new builds to not connect the data cable on any drive you want keep your data safe on if there more then one drive in the system. it better to have to power down after windows install and click the data cable on.

Yes that is one of the most unhelpful elements of Win 7. It has this insane process where it puts a system partition on every attached HDD thus killing off the original partition. The workaround is to disconnect all the drives you want to keep as smorizio has already said. You should be able to recover the partition and data unless you have over written the drive.

Darn. I should have known not to connect both drives. It's been a while since I got to putz with computer hardware and installing Windows and all that junk.

Yeah, I'm looking at Active@ Undelete and GetDataBack for NTFS. I still need to try them. Thanks for the help!