3 partitions, one laptop and a hard place. Sort of URGENT

Okay so I am doing work on this guys computer. He had windows vista. I put windows 7 on another partition. That one wouldn't work with one program so I put another windows 7 on a third partition. This is over the course of a couple months ending in a few days ago. Recently he has put some files in a program called NeatWorks that manages his receipts for his business, so this is very vital stuff. He has already shredded the receipts. I need to get this partition bootable, or at the very least able to access.

What I did was I booted into a gparted disk, took out the vists and old 7 partition and resized the new 7 to take over their space. that was done, but there were a couple gigabyte partitions at the beginning. I told it to resize to take them because what the heck. It did, then it started another process or moving the stuff to the beginning of the disk. I wasn't paying attention and clicked cancel and confirm cancel on the following message saying "DONT MESS WITH CRAP" and now this partition isn't readable. I've tried chkdsk /f, that says write protected. I tried fixmbr which did nothing. I have tried checking to see if I can install vista on another partition, but it says 183g HD with 183 free. I tried DISKPART off the 7 startup disk and it says that the filesystem shows up as raw. I am in the gparted disk again looking through testdisk and it says there is no partition really. Disk part shows me three partitions though, volume 1, 2 and 3. 1 is around 160 gigs so thats the partition I need but I can't access it or make it bootable. I tried act to make it active but now when I load the system without any other disc in there it just repeats on a flashing cursor.

I'm not sure what else to do. I really need to get this guys computer fixed but I'm in over my head here.

One thing I can suggest is to use Recuva to try and recover the partition or the files from it...

Recuva - Undelete, Unerase, File and Disk Recovery - Free Download

Good Luck...

Thanks for your quick reply.

Hook up the laptop hard drive to another computer via cables? Would recuva still read the hard drive even if windows doesn't?

I was thinking from within the other partition, but I re-read your post...

If you hook up to another computer, you should see the drive. at that point run recuva from the good computer...

This should work. I think.

Pretty much.... The data is still there as long as no new data has been written over it. Its all just 0's and 1's... Recuva is a tool created to read that data even if its not recognized as usable data. So the program should find all of the files and then you can restore them to the good computer's HDD...