MBR 123FA: / MBR FA:

It sounds like you should probably at least give this a try:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

"You have two labs?"
"Each has its place. At the university, I try to please the Federal Government. Here, I negotiate with God."

"fdisk /dev/hdc"
Now, what do you think that means? "hdc" is the whole drive not just part of the drive, you just wiped the whole drive and put a new partition table on it. You should have used QTParted from the MEPIS install cd. Now that the damage is done you will need a "file recovery software" and I am no expert at "file recovery", so I can't help you there. But "file recovery software" is what you need, so that should help you a little bit while doing a search. Good Luck.
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How To Ask Questions The Smart Way: www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#id274601
MEPIS Help Files: www.mepis.org/docs/index.php/Main_Page

wow, i didnt know that... The last time i did it was a success, i command "fdisk /dev/hdc", press "p" to print all configured partition, "d" to delete a selected ext3 partition and "w" to save changes... then command "install-mbr /dev/hdc"... my winXP is up and running again,files are untouched...I dont know where did i go wrong this time...

thanks man... yes, I will give a try on this... Its quite interesting...

hoping for other solutions...

Well, I did some reading and I was wrong about it wipeing the drive. It should bring up a window to add and remove partitions on the drive and that is what you wanted to do. I still recommend using QTParted from the install cd. By the way "hdc" on a lot of computers(all of mine) is the cdrom drive while "hda" is the drive that has a normal install of windows, "hda" is the first drive in the system.
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How To Ask Questions The Smart Way: www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#id274601
MEPIS Help Files: www.mepis.org/docs/index.php/Main_Page

"I erased the all the ext3 partion using mepis live CD "fdisk /dev/hdc"..."

Like Jimmy, I'm choking a bit over that one.

You have, to say the least, an unusual drive configuration; which might be the result of misconfigured hardware or some "strangeified" BIOS settings.

Do yourself a favor and do not mess with those partitions until AFTER you've backed up your files, and taken care of whatever issues you have that are causing your drives to enumerate in that way.

BTW: In something like "MBR 123FA" prompt, from the Debian MBR, there are two basic parts to deal with.

The "123" part refers to partition numbers.

The "FA" part lists the valid keyboard commands that are available.

Also see: /usr/share/doc/mbr

"You have two labs?"
"Each has its place. At the university, I try to please the Federal Government. Here, I negotiate with God."

yes next time i will use QTPerted instead... I thought "/dev/hdc/" was named by linux architecture such...

IDE primary master - /dev/hda
IDE primary slave - /dev/hdb
IDE secondary master - /dev/hdc
and so on

Meaning if you plug your CDROM on IDE secondary master is will be /dev/hdc...Maybe, it so happen that my HDD was plugged on IDE secondary master thats why it was named as /dev/hdc

photorec hangup when 30mins estimated time remaing...

i notice that test drive rename all recovered files...

any other data recovery software that you can suggest guys...

thanks..