Windows 7 - Made a mess of my partitions, need to recover what is possible

Hello,

My name is Alex, and first of all, I would like to thank you for taking the time to help me.

SYSTEM: I am running an optiplex 755 with a 160gb 7200rpm hard drive. Just added a 320gb WD 5400rpm hard drive. WAS dual booting Windows 7 pro 64bit (OEM) and winxp pro 32bit

ATTEMPTED: I wanted to stripe data across drives via Windows 7 disk manager... SO. I had the main hard drive (160gb) split up at about 80gb for xp which I was running for a while. I put Windows 7 on a few months ago in an EXTENDED partition. I wanted to get rid of XP and use that space to play around with the data striping. I converted both disks to dynamic drives. Before I erased my XP partition the only status under it was [system], the Windows 7 partition had all other statuses under it such as boot. I figured that since it had the boot status, it was what held the mbr and all that was necessary to boot the system into Windows 7. I was incorrect.

FIX ATTEMPTS: I have used a combination of the ultimate boot cd (ubcd) and the Windows 7 and winxp recovery disks to get things back in order. In ubcd, I used parted magic linux and gparted to create a new partition in the 160gb hard drive with the unallocated space from the prior deletion and restore a complete image that I had taken with clonezilla only moments before this mess. I successfully restored the image to the first partition, it was still unable to boot, I used the winxp boot disk to 'fixboot' and 'fixmbr' to no avail (I believe that this has to do with the fact of the drive being dynamic and gparted created a basic partition). Booted from the partition wizard boot disc to try to convert drive back to basic drive, it basically told me that it is not supported)

WHAT I AM ASKING: Please inform me what was in the deleted partition that was so crucial to booting, I thought that I knew this process but I was dead wrong. I have all 'critical' data on my 320gb hard drive BUT... Windows 7 is OEM so I do not believe that I can install it again... It is my absolute top priority to be able to boot back into windows 7 using whatever means necessary whether that be creating an image from it's partition, formatting the drive, and then restoring it. However, I would like to do this in the most painless and non destructive way as possible. I know I messed things up pretty bad, and that is why I am here.

Also, as a note, when windows doesn't boot, it either tells me that there is no OS, or it just stalls and does nothing with a blinking cursor depending on what I tried to do to fix it. I have also tried using ubcd bootloaders to bootstrap from my usb to the Windows 7 partition.

I personally thank you for your time you are giving to me,

Alex

The boot partition should never be converted to a dynamic disk.
Try using gparted to delete all of the partitions and then you should be able to copy your image over.