Hello,
My Windows 7 had gone mad on my sony vaio laptop. Forgeting about Grub 1, I started the windows 7 reinstall program. (I installed Grub 1 along with a Debian distrib).
 
After the first reboot, Grub came in and threw me into grub rescue mode saying that it couldn't find partitions again. Grb rescue did a terrible job at helping as no known command(even "help" ) worked.
 
I grabbed my debian DVDs, and head to forums where I spent about 2 hours trying to understand how grub could be uninstalled. I tried to follow what that guy is saying: http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/.../msg00698.html.
 
Now when the computer boots it says straight from the BIOS that no OS is found. When running fdisk -l from debian DVD it says that no valid parition table is found.
 
Ok, so my own conclusion to this is: I fucked up all my paritions, including my separate backup partition where all my data was stored. I have lost the sony vaio restore partition.
 
Is this correct? Or any genius out there can sniff the partitions back and reinstall the table?
 
Now, my other -and most important question is - If I buy a windows 7 CD, will it be able to handle my computer as it is now with no proper partition table? Or must I prepare some sort of table for it to at least finds its way?
 
Best Regards,
 
O.

Hi !
 
You just posted to a francophone forum, congrats    
 
About your problem: grub does not need be uninstalled, a simple mbr fix using windows 7 would have been sufficient. Now, if fdisk -l does not show you any partitions, it indeed means you lost table partitions information.
 
I don't know if it is possible to retrieve it using some tool, however reinstalling from scratch will make the trick. Either windows 7 or any linux distribution. You might not need to buy a windows 7 cd, maybe contacting vaio, explain that your laptop partitions are blown out (don't explain why ;-) ) and they might ship you recovery cd for free. Or maybe guide you to a retail store for recovery.
The second solution has one major advantage: it costs you no money  

Thank you for your reply (and sorry for posting in the wrong channel). I contacted Sony and had to pay 60 CHF for a delivery of the CDs. Well, that will teach me...
 
Cheers,
 
O.