Lost my recovery partition

I bought an HP-DV6 1045EE, but I didn't like the partition scheme..

This was the way it first was:

C:\Local Disk [288gb]
D:\Recovery [10gb]

C was preloaded with Windows Vista. I shrunk the partition using Vista's Disk Management as much as I could, and shrunk it further to 50gb using Gparted. After doing this, I couldn't boot into Vista anymore. So I restored the image using the recovery manager.

I then created another 50gig partition for Win7, and installed it. All well and good.

Then I created an extended partition out of the remaining space, since all other partitions were primary, and created two logical partitions, 1 unformatted and the other NTFS.

After this, I booted into Vista and saw that my recovery partition had turned to unallocated space, even though I'd made sure not to touch that partition no matter what.

Now the partition table looks like this:
C:\Windows Vista [50gb]
D:\Windows 7 [50gb]
Unformatted [40gb]
E:\Data [140gb]
Unallocated space [10gb]

How do I get that partition back? I didn't discs on hand to make a recovery disc set. The strange thing (to me) is that the partition is still there, still the exact same size, just unallocated instead of NTFS or whatever it was earlier.

This was yesterday. Upon further examination, I found that Windows detected my 40gb unformatted logical partition as a primary partition.
So I guess that upon detecting 4 primary partitions (counting the extended partition), the larger one (40gb) took the place of the former one. I've since deleted both logical partitions and my table currently looks like this:

C:\Windows Vista (50gb)
E:\Windows 7 (50gb)
\187gb free space
\10gb unallocated (was the recovery partition)

I want to get the partition back without having to order a set of recovery discs. I'm in India, and the laptop was bought in from Dubai.

If I can't get the partition back, I'm thinking of making an image backup using Acronis, but the boot cd wouldn't work right, so I don't want to take my chances.

 

Hmm, as long as the actual data on that portion of the hard drive has not been touched, you should be able to use TestDisk to fix the partition table. Quickest place to find TestDisk: Ultimate Boot CD.
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

 

Thank you very, very much.

I was able to rewrite the partition table and get back the recovery partition, as well as make recovery disc set. Even better it's now part of the extended partition, so I don't think this occurence will be repeated.

Cheers, and thanks again...
MaestroX1