cfdisk not working?

[mandarinos]

Here's my story: My wife's Dell Mini 9 Netbook with Windows XP OS died. It has a 16GB SSD. I was in the middle of installing HP printer software when it shutdown unexpectedly. Then upon turning it back on it says something about a media test failure, check cable and then Operating System Not Found.

I've been able to boot using Damn Small Linux using an external cd drive. When I type 'fdisk -l' I get:

Disk /dev/hda: 15.4 GB, 15408046080 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1873 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Disk /dev/hda doesn't contain a valid partition table

My wife has lots of pictures on the drive that she would like so I took it to a couple data recovery places and they were charging anywhere from $1000 just for jpegs up to $2600 for all files retrieved. That's more than I can budget for this. So my wife accepted the fact that the pictures are gone, but I figured I might as well try what I can because we have nothing more to lose.

I thought I'd try to get a hard drive cubby and attach it through USB to a working PC, but apparently Dell's SSDs are proprietary and the design is not accomodated. I thought maybe just the partition table information got erased somehow, so I tried using gparted and it found nothing. Whenever I use cfdisk and create partitions, I quit cfdisk after writing and it still says there is no valid partition table. I have no other ideas as to what I can do. Any advice? (I'm very new to Linux, btw)

Thanks for any help you can provide!

[Segfault]

Don't know how proprietary this Dell H/W is, why don't you try free forensics tools like photorec and testdisk.

Provided on many Linux liveCDs, like SystemRescueCd 1.5.6

Download here SystemRescueCd on SourceForge.net