Please help. Partition table wiped out just before install

More information would have helped.

1. How many partitions do you have?

2. Were or are you trying to do the clean install only on the system partition leaving the other partitions as they were/are?

In any case you may try the Partition Recovery Wizard in MiniTools Partition Wizard Home edition. Download the bootable CD version from Free download Magic Partition Manager Software, partition magic alternative, free partition magic, partition magic Windows 7 and server partition software - Partition Wizard Online (the last one on this page)

Partition Recovery: How to perform lost partition recovery and deleted partition recovery under Windows? Partition Recovery Help.

You may either burn the ISO to a CD and boot from it or create a bootable pen drive with that ISO using Rufus Rufus - Create bootable USB drives the easy way

Note: If you had created a bootable pen drive, when booting with it you have to type linux0 against the boot prompt and press Enter for the boot process to continue. ( It is zero and not the alphabet O. You may press TAB key to see all available options)

hey thanks a lot Jumanji for your reply and sorry not getting back to you sooner but I quickly found a tool on the AVG rescue disk called TestDisk which allowed me to do multiple iterative searches for possible backup or simply logical partition structure on this disc. The problem was when the collision between Kaspersky attempting to Auto Scan the new DrIve and Disk Management Console occurred it had just created the partition and was clearly still working on the file structure. what test disc ended up digging out of the rubble was 1 partition in fat32 structure and fragments of other partitions in NTFS. This makes a lot of sense because disk management was in the process of finishing formatting the partitions from: fat32 to NTFS. The fat32 partition it recovered covered the entire drive what I ended up doing was trashing that one not allowed me to recover the only one important NTFS partition and then move the files off the drive. I would recommend this tool to anyone who is not having success with recovery software which simply does a basic undelete of partition data. I have now successfully written the windows 7 Iso 2 the first partition and I have all of my files which were recovered on a second partition. In the BIOS I changed the boot order to removable device first and that failed. Somewhat devastated I when it back into the BIOS and looked at the list of disk drives which were detected and lo and behold there was a USB mini drive so activating that as one of the potential boot devices allowed me to then move that device to the number one position and Here I am in the very first screen of Windows 7 service pack 1 insta. It should not have been this hard but I learned something. Thanks again for taking the time to write back and I will most definitely be looking at the software you recommended.

You did a great job all by yourself using TestDisk. Yet another testimony for TestDisk.

Both Partition Wizard and TestDisk can basically find the deleted/corrupted partition table, though these can adopt a different methodology doing the same.

Using the Partition Wizard, at the stage where it shows the deleted partitions (if it successfully managed to find the partitions) one can explore the partition with the partition explorer. One can only see the files but not copy at this stage. The partition table has to be necessarily restored to access the hard drive and read the files.

When using TestDisk, if it finds the partitions, one can not only list the files but copy them to another drive even before rewriting the partition table.

In a complicated case like yours (about which I had no idea till you elaborated in your last post), where data recovery is of primary importance, TestDisk should have been the best choice and you did it.

I have my own doubts whether Partition Wizard would have shown the files in your case. But that is the easiest one to use and if it had failed I would have recommended TestDisk. :)
Recover a flash drive turned RAW – Partition Wizard and TestDisk.

Without knowing the skill level of the user, I do not recommend TestDisk first since it is a little bit daunting to users not conversant with DOS windows. In your case you proved to be more skilled than I would have thought.:)

Good going.