Windows' Disk Manager destroyed my partition table

At the end, they did it again!
This is not the first time Windows destroys my partition tables. I should have known better...

15 partitions, Vista, XP, Ubuntu, Kanotix and all the data disks--- down the drain.
And all because after installing XP (successfully at my first try) I decided to make active again the partition with Vista (I still have something over there and I was going to have a dual - actually quad - boot for a while, before being fully operational with XP.

The result of what should have been writing two single byte in the PT (mark partition 1 as active, mark partition 2 as not active) has been to wipe out the whole extended partition.
Very nice, Windows. Very clever.

Right now I am running Testdisk under a live linux distro in order to recovery the partition structure. As is often (always ?) the case, the backup I have of my partiton table is not recent enough (changed everything in the last days, I hoped to have everything installed before backing up again...).

Purpose of this message is threefold:
1) Spit some venom in order to keep me from booking a flight to Redmond and perform a kamikaze attack.
2) Warn other multiboot users not to ever think to use Microsoft "disk manglers".
3) Asking for advice on the recovery I'm attempting.

Fact is that testdisk found the correct primary partitions at first try, but was not able to identify the extended partition.
At a second, deeper, search it found the whole extenede partition pack, but not the primary partitions.
Life is a *****, they say... :-]
Now I am running the deeper search but it's taking ages and the laptop is getting hotter and hotter.

Anyone knows if testdisk can allow 'partial' recovery?
I'd like to save the partition data for the first partition in the first search and the data for the other partition from the second search.

Testdisk's documentation is a bit unclear to me. My other recoveries found everything at the second try.

Ok, let's roast a marshmallow in front of the heatpipe vent, in the meanwhile...

 

ok, never mind.
I had it go all the way.
It found the two older partition tables and I had to choose which partitions were the last ones. Luckily I made notes on the sizes of the partition on pencil and paper.

One suggestion to anyone trying to recovery a PT on a DELL laptop: remember to change the partition type of the Dell Utilty partition, it's not recognized as such by Testdisk. Changing the type to DE will set things straight.

 

Well, it seems that microsoft wasn't done with me yet.
After recovering the whole partition table screwed up by XP, I tried to fix Vista's boot. As suggested by Microsoft itself, I booted from the Vista DVD and choose "repair", then "command prompt".
I checked that I could see the C: partition and that it carried Vista (I had already checked in Linux that I could see all the recovered partitions and their content) and issue a
bootrec.exe /fixmbr
bootrec.exe /fixboot
command that shouldn't have touched the partition table.

Guess what?
At the next reboot I got a 'disk error'.
Tried in Linux and Gparted shows no partition at all.
Testdisk shows a newly messed up partititon table. And again a need a deep search.

Thank you microsoft for wasting my time twice.
I appreciate the effort you put into programming with your butts (I see now the reason for the 'ergonomical' keyboard).

 

So it's Vista, not XP that caused it?

By Vista, you mean?
You just said it only happened when you tried to set Vista as the active partition.

Are you sure it's not a hardware problem then? If there are disk errors, that'd definitely explain your problems.

I can't speak for Vista, but I've never had XP cause any problems in this area.

Since you mention it's a Dell laptop, I know there have been one or two threads in the past about some Dell software accidentally wiping out people's partition tables. (Media Direct, I think?)
Not sure if that's the case here, but figured I'd mention it.

 

Thanks for answering.

Actually they both played a part.

XP messed up the partition table when I set the Vista partition as active.
As soon as I clicked on "Make active" in the context menu of the Vista partition under XP's Disk Manager, I got a messed up partition table: the whole extended partition was gone and I was left with some 130-ish GB of unallocated space. I could see that in XP's Disk Manager.
All it had to do was to change one bit in the partition type byte of the Vista and XP partition. It changed a great deal more. I searched for an "undo" option, but that would have been expecting too much from MS creative coding...

Well, testdisk was able to recovery the whole partition table (I had to run a deeper search because I had the remnants of a previous set of partitions).
At the end I was able to see all my data, including XP's partition and Vista partition (now set active by testdisk).

When I booted into Vista's CD I accessed the prompt and saw that C: was indeed Vista's partition. So the directory structure was intact (I also navigated into the user directory).

I then chose to do a bootrec.exe /fix-thinghy stuff, clearly putting too much trust into Microsoft's anal programming.
Result was that at the next boot there was no longer a C: partition, and the whole partition table had been mangled all over again.

Testdisk has been able to recovery the DELL utility, the XP and the whole extended partition. But the Vista partition is now unreadable. It seems that the file allocation table has been overwritten (not sure about that, I'm still investigating and trying to recover it -BTW any help is greatly appreciated).

Even worse, despite Testdisk and Linux can see the remaining partitions (I can read data from XP's partition or from one of my data partition in the ext part) when I access GParted (I wanted to make sure that everything was fine) All I get is 149 GB of unallocated space. Luckily, Gparted doen not write anything on disk without prior consent but this is sure buggin me...

The disk error I got was in the line of "there is no C: drive".

Thanks, but Media Direct's partition was gone the day after I received the laptop: it's been turned into an extended partition, after shrinking Vista to 25 GB. I've been happily triple booting Vista, Kanotix and Ubuntu for months. The last partition I deleted has been Dell's recovery partition. And I have been using either Vista and Linux with that partition wiped out without problems. XP installed fine in it and endured many reboots and shutdowns.

I am now trying to confront the old partition table I saved before modifying the extended partition structure with the one I managed to recover. Apart from the extended partition start and end data there seems to be a different byte in every primary partition: in the old PT it's set as "80" in the new PT is now "00". Sound like there is some problem with the active attribute...

I'm going back to pencil and paper to see the start and end sectors of each partition to see if I can change that byte safely and then get a correct partition structure in GParted.
Once I get there, I can think about wiping Vista for good right now.