Vista Recovery/boot Disc No Longer Displaying C Drive After Dban Partial Overwrite

Basically, I have a desktop pc with vista 32 home something installed, the hardrive failed once. A friend of mine who I no longer really speak to because he started dating my ex behind my back fixed it once, and then after that I did a dban wipe so I could sell it off encase it failed again. The problem started because I turned the pc off 2 percent into the wipe because I realised I had forgotten to back up a lot of files I can't replace onto an external harddrive, meaning the files are probably 98% still there, but when I put in the vista recovery/boot CD to see if I could repair the drive and backup my files, the C partition now no longer appears as an option to put vista on. I tried to repair tool but it located no problems. There are no longer ANY partitions. I have a laptop I could put it's harddrive into, but because it was partially overwritten (roughly 2-3% before i unplugged it) I dont know if it'll tell me it wants to format my files if I connect it to my laptop as an external which is what it usually does with corrupt drives, I'm not even sure my files will show up or be accesible despite 98 percent not being overwrrittten. I have zero experience taking computers apart, my friend was supposed to be doing it for me but no longer is for the former reasons haha. So i'm stuck with a dead drive with possible recoverable data, but no partition to load windows onto to access them. Please help!

 

Connect the HDD to your laptop and look if partition C is accessible.

 

Unfortunately, DBAN removed the MFT (Master File Table) and there's no way for you to personally recover those files. The only way MIGHT be to take the drive to a Data Recovery Service Center capable of forensics. They will go through the drive platter by platter in a "clean room". The process is very expensive ($500 — $800) and may not be 100% successful.

 

You could try any number of programs that will recover data, dd is a very good tool for this - it is Linux based and free. There are so many programs hard to say which one would work best.
OSFClone & OSFMount are good . Also http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk Clean room procedures are done if there is something physically wrong with the drive, there would be no reason to disassemble a drive that is functioning.

 

A hard drive is directly analogous to a filing cabinet which, when new, came filled with blank pieces of paper. The first piece contains the boot code and the partition table which basically says," I am a Windows filing cabinet that begins at this piece of paper, ends at that piece of paper, and I have this many pieces, total" (It could be DOS, LINUX, MAC OSX; it doesn't matter) After that, the O/S creates files or folders in the filing cabinet; but, to keep things zippy, never overwrites a piece of paper unless it is explicitely told to. Things we erase get their first character changed to a special one which means "don't show this to me, anymore"
What DBAN does is to write on top of every piece of paper in the filing cabinet starting from the first and, by the time it had reached .01%, the paper that said it was a Windows drive was gone.
Of all of the programs I have used in 39+ years of fixing these things, GetDataBack is just about the only one that has a chance. It will scan every piece of paper in the filing cabinet and present you with scenarios of possibly valid partitions (luckily, there is a backup copy at the end of the drive which should still be good and it will find it) Afterwards, you can choose the layout you want to try and it will build a list of folders and files. The odds are it will find most of your stuff.
It isn't free; but, you don't have to buy it until you've seen what it can recover: https://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm
You need to have the drive connected to a working PC (one that boots) and you need to have enough space to copy the recovered files to.