OpenSUSE Install :: Upgrading 11.2->11.3 Corrupted A Different Partition?

I know I said I wouldn't do anything that could possibly do anything bad to the drive until I receive my external hard drive. I just didn't expect that upgrading from 11.2 to 11.3 via zypper dup has the potential to do that.

First, the problem: The most important partition of my computer containing all the irreplaceable stuff (images) which I had apparently only partially backed up was corrupted after I upgraded from 11.2 to 11.3.

On my computer, there are 2 drives. sda was the one that had Windows. sdb had an NTFS partition and a few smaller partitions which I used for openSUSE. After doing quite a bit of searching on upgrades corrupting partitions, I didn't find anything about it doing what I feared which was corrupting the NTFS so I went ahead and upgraded.

The upgrade went along smoothly. No problems that I could tell. The only weird thing was that the window borders disappeared near the end but I assumed that was supposed to happen. And then I restarted. First thing I noticed was that the background was blue instead of the image I had set (which happened to be on the NTFS partition). I didn't think much of it at the time figuring it was just a quirk in the upgrade process. I went ahead and decided to reset the background to what it was. And then I realized that the NTFS partition was missing -- it wasn't mounted or visible at all. That was when I started to panic a bit.

I opened up Yast partitioner and everything looked fine except that NTFS partition in question had a little * by it. I went ahead and reset its mount point only to receive an error saying that the filesystem in question doesn't exist. And sda became sdb and sdb became sda if that changes anything.

I went into Windows expecting for it to do a CHKDISK on bootup for the drive (D: ) but none of that happened. Hoping that everything was fine, I went in and tried to access it only be given an error along the lines of "The drive in D: is not formatted. Do you want to format it?" Of course, I said no but that was when I realized that this was no partition table problem like last time.

I tried restarting but Windows froze and refused to do so for several minutes so forced the computer to shutdown and loaded my copy of GParted LiveCD. It showed a 30GB unrecognized partition, another 30MB one and some unallocated space. TestDisk fixed that. (so it turns out, there was a partition table issue) What was left was what looked OK except the one partition on sda (the original sdb) that I could not afford to lose had an error.

I can't remember the exact error but it said something like "Are you trying to use a disk as a partition? Are you trying to use /dev/sda as /dev/sda1 or vice versa?" That was either in the error message or in the message I got when I tried to check the disk.

Still trying to get Windows to check the disk, I tried booting from the new sda into Windows. What I got was the Dell Utility program. It said no mouse detected and I couldn't do anything so I shut it down.

I tried going back into Windows the normal way and got the Dell Utility. I figured that this was an MBR problem after I went back into openSUSE with the new sdb still reading perfectly. Although I couldn't manage to restore the MBR so I can't log into Windows. But the other issue is far more important.