Anyway, so I was logged into Windows 7 and I had my 2TB WD external HDD connected to the notebook and uTorrent was running when there was a power outage. My notebook's battery is as good as dead so before Windows could hibernate, the computer turned off. Since then, I've been encountering an error code of 0x0000225 ("Windows failed to start. A recent hardware or software change might be the cause") and neither Win 7 or Win 8 would boot. Win XP would boot if I switched HDD over to IDE and tried again. I read on a forum somewhere that others have experienced the same problem when they've left a large external USB HDD connected to the computer while shutting down.
So I connected my 2TB WD HDD to the notebook during boot, but that didn't work, so I started Win XP, installed TestDisk, followed the instructions in the Step By Step guide and probably did something wrong because then Win XP wouldn't boot either and I got the dreaded "NTLDR is missing" error. Probably because I made the Win XP partition primary bootable.
Thankfully, I had downloaded GParted Live CD and made a bootable USB drive out of it. I booted from the USB drive and ran testdisk again, did quick as well as deep search for lost partitions and after a few trial and errors, set the SYSTEM RESERVED partition to primary bootable and I finally managed to get Win 8 booting again. I also recovered 4 other partitions, one of which had Win 8 installed.
But now I don't see my Win 7 partition or the Win XP partition. I don't care much about booting into XP but if I could boot into Win 7 again, that'd be really nice.
Here is the latest testdisk backup of my partition table which is currently being used:
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#1385092443 Disk /dev/sda - 1000 GB / 931 GiB - CHS 121601 255 63
1 : start= 24578048, size= 210247, Id=07, *
2 : start=171583461, size=1751075739, Id=0F, E
5 : start=171583488, size=449794647, Id=07, L
6 : start=659449791, size=209714904, Id=05, X
6 : start=659449856, size=209714839, Id=07, L
7 : start=1009924020, size=424905390, Id=05, X
7 : start=1009924096, size=424905314, Id=07, L
8 : start=1859733414, size= 62925786, Id=05, X
8 : start=1859733504, size= 62925696, Id=07, L
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Current partition structure:
1 * HPFS - NTFS 1529 232 48 1542 254 63 210247 [SYSTEM RESERVED]
2 E extended LBA 10680 147 1 119679 254 63 1751075739
Warning: number of heads/cylinder mismatches 16 (NTFS) != 255 (HD)
5 L HPFS - NTFS 10680 147 28 38678 254 63 449794647 [Miscellaneous]
X extended 41048 217 1 54102 254 63 209714904
6 L HPFS - NTFS 41048 218 3 54102 254 63 209714839 [RootWin8]
X extended 62864 220 1 89313 254 63 424905390
7 L HPFS - NTFS 62864 221 14 89313 254 63 424905314 [Music and Other Stuff]
X extended 115763 13 1 119679 254 63 62925786
8 L HPFS - NTFS 115763 14 28 119679 254 63 62925696 [Stuff]