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For all who have this problem and don't already know, a good procedure is:

#1: DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING! Like the doctors say, first do no harm.

Do not use any utilities that write to the drive, as they could damage it further. If it's your boot disk that's dead, boot with Knoppix to see if it's readable (Knoppix booting won't touch the hard drive). If it is readable (Windows just died, not the file system) you can try your Windows recovery disk or use Knoppix to move the data to its own folder on the hard drive and reinstall Windows without reformatting. If it isn't readable:

#2: Get another hard drive or other storage that can hold the data. For my 120GB hard drive I couldn't afford another drive that big (120 was the biggest available at the time and very expensive) so I pulled it off in chunks to the computer and wrote to DVDs.

#3: Have patience. This is going to take a while.

#4: Get software like File Scavenger ($40) or OnTrack (real expensive) that does read-only recovery of the drive. There is a demo of File Scavenger available to see if it works.

#5: If that doesn't work, decide if your data is worth the several hundred to several thousand dollars pros will charge for recovery. If the data is classified, well, how much you got left on your IMPAC card?

#5: After you're done, reformat the drive and do a sector-by-sector disk check. It should still be good to go if it was just a corrupted MFT that caused the problem.

It should still be good to go if it was just a corrupted MFT that caused the problem.

Looks to me like he blew away either the partition table or the entire MBR, not the MFT - nevermind files, he can't even find the partitions. With a low-level disk editor, you can track down the backup boot record (if it's an NTFS disk) and write it overtop the corrupt copy - I pulled that rabbit out of my hat a couple of months ago, but it's not for the faint-hearted ;)