Can't see boot partition...

[1gcrazy]

Ok guys, I am fixing a laptop for a friend of mine.
I pulled the hard drive out immediately to pull a small piece of information she wanted on there. We found it in minutes and never looked back as I fixed her computer. A few days later I go to back up her information for her and All I see is Recovery: and instead of 120gb all I see is 9.99Gb and its 6.xxGb full.
Where did her info go??
During the fix, I left her hard drive in my personal rig. It was well protected and left on over night a few days in a row just like I normally do.

What is the deal? I have tried disc scanning/fixing via Windows 7. I've tried going through a USB interface, i've tried letting it cool off, using vista's repair disc?
I really need her info. Lots of pictures she's going to be upset about. Not sure what happened???

 

[pcgeek11]

Ok guys, I am fixing a laptop for a friend of mine.
I pulled the hard drive out immediately to pull a small piece of information she wanted on there. We found it in minutes and never looked back as I fixed her computer. A few days later I go to back up her information for her and All I see is Recovery: and instead of 120gb all I see is 9.99Gb and its 6.xxGb full.
Where did her info go??
During the fix, I left her hard drive in my personal rig. It was well protected and left on over night a few days in a row just like I normally do.

What is the deal? I have tried disc scanning/fixing via Windows 7. I've tried going through a USB interface, i've tried letting it cool off, using vista's repair disc?
I really need her info. Lots of pictures she's going to be upset about. Not sure what happened???

It sounds like the Boot partition was deleted and all you have left is the recovery partition ( Must be an HP ). Go to disk management when connected to your computer Via USB and check to see what the partitions look like, You may be able to initialize the boot partition if it is still there and assign a drive letter from there also.

If the partition has been deleted I think there are some programs that can attempt to recover them but I have never used any of these. YMMV

You should have pulled the data off when you had it connected the first time...

Were you working on her hard disk or the laptop hardware?

 

[Tlkki]

There are data recovery programs which can read the disk at a low level and recover files even without a partition. This can take a long time, and needs the disk to be physically intact. Just google for NTFS data recovery. Dont remember if there are free ones.
Some years back i recovered a 160GB maxtor drive. Got most of the data back even when the drive was about to pop mechanically as well.

 

[Intexity]

i have had good luck with get data back for ntfs...hope it helps