Recover an entire hard disk

Ok so heres what happened, i setup my computer to backup the hard drive onto my external, however i have two internal hard drives and by accident i set it to overwrite my internal hard disk, however none of the data was written over(due to some BIOS issues or something writing to the drive makes it reboot) My computer doesnt regonize the disk as being there, I opened Deice manager and its there and its there in Acronis True Image 10 but as unallocated space, how can i recover this data? (Vista) In the mean time i have unplugged the hard drive from my computer to prevent it from accessing it. i think that it is possible that only the "Table of Contents" was written over (there probably a better word for that.

 

It may be the Master Boot Record is corrupt. Boot up with a bootable floppy which has fdisk on it.

From the A:> prompt type

fdisk /mbr

This will reset the Master Boot Record (the Table of Contents)

 

actually managed to figure it out on my own and recover all the data except two files which is pretty good. I used Active@ Undelete, it takes awhile but it got all my data back.

 

Excellent. As it so happens my suggested fix wouldn't have worked as you would have an NTFS formatted disk.

 

R-Studio is a pretty good recovery program if you need it too. Not every expensive either.