formatted hard disk as FAT32

After trying to format a USB thumbdrive, I got this error message when trying to boot: "NTLDR is missing". With a live Linux CD, I learned that I had formatted my entire hard disk to a single FAT32 partition.

Previously, the disk had an empty space at the beginning where a small hidden Dell utility partition used to be, and the rest was an NTFS partition.

Is there anything I can do to fix this? All the data is still there, but I don't know how to access it. My only tools are a Kubuntu 6.06 CD and a borrowed laptop with dialup internet access running Windows XP.

gpart

I tried gpart. It detects the NTFS partition at a 39 MB offset (the offset seems right) but thinks it's a FAT32 partition, even if I tell it to put more weight on NTFS. It also detects the FAT32 partition that begins at the beginning of the drive, and if I try to skip a few sectors so it won't detect it, gpart won't detect the NTFS partition either.

Finds both, but thinks second is FAT32:
gpart -f
gpart -f -w ntfs,10000

Finds nothing:
gpart -k 1

I've tried several other options, but I've never been able to get gpart to detect the NTFS partition without detecting the FAT32 partition, and I've never been able to get it to detect the NTFS partition as NTFS.

I set the output of gpart to verbose and ran it again. It detected two FAT32 partitions and gave information about both of them, then inored the information about the second and created an MBR of just the first one. I edited the data of the first partition to match the information given for the second partition and then changed the listed file system to NTFS. Then I wrote the MBR to disk.

When I restarted the computer, Windows XP still wouldn't boot. All I got was an "Invalid system disk" error message.

After booting back into an Ubuntu (with Gnome) live CD, I used a few programs like fdisk, cfdisk, sfdisk, and parted to check the MBR. They all said the disk has a 39 MB empty space followed by an NTFS partition. However, the GUIs that I used to check the disks all claimed the disk had a FAT32 partition on it.

So in some way the partition is still labeled as FAT32, even though the MBR claims it is NTFS.

What does Microsoft's fdisk report?

If all else fails, GetDataBack for NTFS lets you scan the entire disk for things resembling NTFS files and then lets you copy off what it found to another disk.

How would I run Microsoft's fdisk? The Windows XP recovery CD didn't have it.

Microsoft's fixmbr said the master partition table was non-standard. Is it possible that gpart wrote it in a way that Windows couldn't understand?

Its a shame your laptop most likely does not have a floppy disk drive.  You could make a DOS start up disk and then you could run fdisk after booting to DOS from the floppy. If you can get access to a PC which has a floppy this is the easiest way to go.
Insert floppy, select format, create MS DOS start up disk.

>>8
Yes I wish they made CDs bootable too, it would be a useful feature on modern computers

I got another hard disk, set it to master, and installed Windows XP on it. Then I copied my personal files from the borked disk with GetDataBack NTFS. It seemed like GetDataBack was able to detect the entire file system, and I haven't missed anything yet from my personal files.

Now I just have to figure out how to setup Windows XP. It won't detect my integrated audio or my graphics card, and standby is disabled. :( Maybe I'll just switch to Linux.

Thanks for the suggestions!

>>10
Dowload drivers from motherboard manufacturer/ati/nvidia
Or just use linux.