operating system missing -or- misadventures in partitioning

[firey-eyez]

i was attempting to partition my hard drive so i could install the w7 beta and try it out. i am using vista HP 32 bit. the file partitioning program built in wouldn't allow me access to this functionality, giving the error "Logical Disk Manager Access Is Denied" or something to that effect. so i downloaded easeus partition manager and proceeded to make a partition of 30 gigs.

i clicked apply changes and it promptly rebooted. it was then trying to allocate files or something, and i accidentally hit the reset button. it began to restart but then it gave the error "Operating system missing". understandably i was concerned at this point. i got out the Vista DVD and tried to use a restore point. it said there weren't any (i know this is wrong because i've restored before). i used the command prompt from the recovery options menu and did diskpart.exe and checked on my C drive. apparently it is now a 466GB partition in RAW file format, status was "healthy".

huh. my external is still intact, in fact i was able to search through its files to look for device drivers or something, from the recovery options menus. the C drive, however, is 0 of 0 bytes and is not searchable. so it seems that my C drive has no files on it. if so then i have no option other than to let it reinstall Vista.

i'd rather not do that though, because i would lose a lot of files. is there any way to get it to boot again? is it possible that it's just looking for the OS files in the wrong place or something?

 

[Joe Average]

Boot off the Vista DVD and do the boot recovery options, only takes a few seconds (it's all GUI-based now but you can still do some stuff from the Command Prompt) and will restore the Vista bootloader and handle the MBR as well. There's not much else you can do, so... don't mess with the other options, the System Restore, or anything else, just the boot recovery options from the GUI WinPE environment off the Vista DVD.

Good luck.