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Strange situation while reinstalling Win7 tonight.

I have a 500gb hd...100gb partition for windows and the rest partitioned into storage. I reinstalled win7 tonight because I upgraded my mobo and cpu. After the install, I noticed my storage partition was gone. I went into disc manager and saw my storage partition was listed as unallocated (black bar) space. I right clicked on the partition...clicked "new primary" and chose "do not format". The partition is now listed as RAW, and I cannot access any of my files.

Did I do something wrong?

Sounds like you erased your storage partition when you were setting up the disk for the re-install. You might be able to get your information back with the right tools (I'm sure others can make suggestions), but I hope you have a backup handy.

Well, I have tried everything to regain access to the partition...no luck. Its pretty much gone forever.

I would like to try to piece together what happened. As I mentioned before: 500GB HD...100GB partition for windows and 400GB for storage. I should probably mention that the storage partition was created with a program inside of windows. When booted up the windows DVD the storage partition was not visible...I thought nothing of it because the 100GB partition I wanted to put windows on was visible. After the new Win7 install (trying to find my storage) I tried some file recovery programs with no luck...but several of them said there was a boot record on the unallocated RAW partition.

I'm pretty much lost as to what happened. Any insight would be welcomed.

Suggestions: Make backups. Don't use more than one partition per drive. Keep your critical data on a separate drive. Unhook the critical drives while you're formatting or partitioning another drive.

OP, have you tried GetDataBack NTFS? In my experience it's good at recovery from a lost partition. Give it a try at various settings, starting with the default. From your description it sounds like your odds are good.