Hey guys, help me out! It's a long read, but please have patience, I really need you!
I am running Windows 7 on a 500 GB SATA HDD. I have 4 partitions, and had wanted to expand the size of my 4th partition. So I burnt a GParted disk (0.6.2) and then booted into it, resized the partition (moved 30 GB off from D:, added it to E:, then moved it to F:, which is the partition I wanted to expand) and when I started the process, in a few minutes, it threw some Read/Write error and quit. So when I restarted my machine, Scandisk ran and reported no errors. But when I logged in, all 3 partitions (except my primary, C: ) were gone! I fired up Disk Management tool to see that 2 partitions were unallocated and the other was empty. I panicked and downloaded this free tool, MiniTool Partition Recovery tool and ran a scan. It reported that it could recover the contents of my E: (and also showed all the files I had) and so I clicked on 'Recover'. Then it showed up an message box, saying "At least one partition will be deleted, do you want to proceed?". Fearing it would delete my data, I clicked on Cancel. Now again I went back to Windows Disk Management to find that all 3 partitions had been marked unallocated!!
Now I'm guessing the partition table has become corrupted, not the data, as all processes stopped quickly (GParted stopped in a few minutes, and MiniTool too). What could have gone wrong?
And please suggest some trusted partition recovery tool. I am currently at a loss of over 300GB worth of very very precious data - my entire music collection that I've amassed over 12 years - it is all that is me. Thanks.