Deleted OEM Partition and now cannot boot

take the drive out and put it into another machine that is already booted and see what you can get off it
you may need some help from friends but once your in the situation your in you need another drive to boot up with an OS with that drive connected then you can access it get what you need off of it (dox, tunes, pix) and then put it back in the original PC and reformat and reinstall ...I know this not what you want to hear but it will save you much grief all this repair stuff will drive you batty .... the other day I had this hp and I shut it off while booting and then windows said it was damaged after running all these repair utilities it said it could not fix the drive ... then I shut down and restart and the drive is fine ... still working
anyway my point is repair utilities almost never work and directly accessing the drive is going to be near impossible since the partition is all jacked however putting it in another machine (if you have one or have a friends) takes 10 minutes and then mark it as active as described by the gurus.....

one more thing when you partitioned if there is only one and you losst the 100mb system part with the boot mgr you will never be able to boot from it unless you use bcdedit (boot utility ) and create a new system partition with a new boot record .... how to do that without a working OS is a mystery however the task can easily be accomplished if you put the drive in another machine as the secondary drive... good luck

Well it is a laptop, so removing is not an option.

And from Technet, "You cannot assign a drive letter to an OEM partition".

what do you mean removing a laptop drive is the easiest ... if theres a jumper that might be a pain but laptop drives are generally of two types just like desk tops (IDE or SATA) but I see your point laptops generally have one drive bay so you might be hard pressed to find a running lap that you could plug your drive into however many newer machines have external SATA ports so if its sata your in luck .... try to create 100mb parttiton and fix your mbr ...

Did you try anyway?

Yeah, I tried. No joy.

The thing is at the end of the day I have my data backed up. So there is not point in removing the disk to retrieve data.

What do you mean by this, "try to create 100mb parttiton and fix your mbr ..."?