partition wipe fix
I know this info will be useless now almost a year on, but just incase anyone else has this problem (or you come across it again) it's an easy fix.
All the data is still on the drive but its the partition table that gets damaged hence a new on gets created (or something like that) which acts like 1 large partition. All you have to do is restore the partition table structure. I had the same problem happen to me a while back when i used some software, i think it was GParted, and i wasn't as careful as i should have been - but with me it didn't happen on one drive, it wiped my partitions on 2 separate drives. I managed to use a software called "partition table doctor" which detected all the partition info and restored them and every piece of data returned like nothing had happened.
Now i backup my partition data if i modify them using another freeware program HDhacker - not sure how good this is as i've luckily not had to use it, but i imagine it will be a straightforward fix, i shall test the restore function on a spare drive someday.
But yeah, playing with partitions can cause very random errors.
