Destroyed and mangled MBR, have mercy

[GnoitAll]

OK, thanks again for your help. I'll take my issue to another forum now and see if I can resolve it...

To recap, in case anyone else has this problem, I simply ran TestDisk, which restored the partition table, and then restored the boot manager by using the Vista DVD. Whereas the DVD would crash if I connected the drive via SATA, when I connected through a USB adapter (I got this one: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-111-_-Product), the Vista DVD loaded, and recognized the windows installation. It didn't recognize it before running testdisk.

Testdisk can be gotten here: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

I may just backup and reinstall, but recalling back to how much of a pain that is, I might still consider a few options.
-Julian

[ronparent]

You seem to have four disks and all of them damaged? Is it possible that they were configured in some kind of a four disk raid array? That suggests a raid10 perhaps. In that case attempting to install to one disk (ie sda) of a four disk raid would trash your partition table. That would be also be possible if your raid level were not supported by dmraid and the raid wasn't recognized during install.

[GnoitAll]

No, nothing like that. It's just a single 320gb drive. I think the reason it showed 4 'partitions' is that the partition table was broken. Why 4? It might have something to do with Plop bootloader, with which I was playing with many settings.

Unless you're referring to this:

=======Devices which don't seem to have a corresponding hard drive==============

sdc sdd sde sdf

Which is simply a multi-card reader, I believe.