Repaired by what utility?
Losing partitions is pretty much a drive wipe. No repair utility should do that under any circumstances unless you decide you have no furthor use for any data on the partition.
First off once you start writing to that HD you are destroying data. Do NOT use it for anything except to read it. Don’t even create partitions. If you do then all chance of recovering partitions are pretty much gone.
Grab a Knoppix CD, boot up and try to mount the partitions. If they still exist you can recover essential data that way. You will find a utility called Parted or Gparted in the system utilties menu. This utility might be able to recover partitions for you.
If the partitions are gone you need to manually repair the partitions. Not a task for those without considerable expertise and patience. What you can do instead to retrieve text data that is essential is use a utility that will walk the disk. A good easy one is the dd utility in Linux. You can dd the entire partition, then run the utility called Strings on that image to extract all text data from the HD. Then view the data cutting and pasting text to individual files as you run accross essential data. Technically you can recover binary files from the image produced by dd however this is a very complex process and only worth it in cases of extreme interest in those files.
Always write the data to another drive of some sort. Using Knoppix you can set up networking and mount windows or other types of shares and write them to those drives instead. You will need tons of drive space free. While it is extremely slow an external USB drive might be your best option for this.
Your system is hosed. You might be able to pull it back up for a short time recovering partitions but assume you have to start completely from scratch. All you are doing is recovering partitions to recover data. So even if you recovoer the partitions back up anything important then do a wipe and load on your system including repartitioning. A common sign of impending failure in a HD is to lose partitions like that. You may be looking at a new HD as well. Back up dailly for a bit once you wipe and load. If it happens a second time replace the HD.

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