[dementis]

I basically have done the same thing on both occasions except the first one I have oddly done multiple times. One of the occasions still felt like I wasted all of my time and effort too because it was for a custom HPC environment(I was performing a major OS upgrade that also involved getting a lot programs to work on a 64 bit OS when they were originally written for a 16 or 32 bit OS) that was trashed within two months after the environment was fully up and running. The client not only bought new hardware(after repetitively telling me they wouldn't have a budget to do that for a couple of years) but also pulled a 180 on the decision that certain Opensource tools could be used within the environment after a code review and approval process was completed.

Did you try to recover the corrupted windows partition table first using either Testdisk by CGSecurity or Hiren's BootCD? If it was on a UNIX or Linux file system that sort of thing can be recovered a lot easier thanks to alternate superblocks and the ability to basically copy the partition sectors from another disk that is the same size with the same partitioning thanks to the dd command.