absolutely useless garbage merges microsoft ntfs

I'd welcome any advice of any kind as this is unknown territory for me. Does anyone know what else can be done, or why the rescue disk doesn't do what should (maybe it's looking for a non-ntfs partition)? If I knew where in the disk the data is kept I might copy it over to the partition. I can deal with having the entire system unbootable - if only I could fix the headers thing I might be able to mount it through linux and salvage the data! However the rescue disk doesn't work.

Looking at the partition with the same editor I can in fact see that the headers weren't written over at all! It didn't restore anything. used it to restore the standard volume header, it says the restoration is complete, yet still doesn't work. Using the original Rescue Disk I restored TC's bootloader to MBR (worked in the past when GRUB was screwed) - doesn't work. My entire university studying material is there, lectures, notes and all the rest (shame on me for not making proper backups)! What all this means is that without the headers all the data is lost. Trying to mount this from Linux as a TC drive yields a similar result - 'Wrong password or not a TrueCrypt volume' (the password is correct). Obviously, this meant the TC bootloader is useless as it keeps saying 'No bootable system found' or something similar. Using a hex editor I can see that it's no longer truecrypt's 'random garbage' it once was). Which apparently wrote over the beginning of the partition, erasing the TC header data and practically making it a simple NTFS partition (I was horrified to find out that I can simply mount it from Linux as if it wasn't encrypted! In fact there are files there that take up a few good MB. Yesterday, after deleting and moving around some partitions (not the encrypted ones!) and testing Windows 7 installation, some system process decided to 'do me a favor' and to 'fix' my encrypted Vista partition without asking. Using GRUB on MBR, its menu allows loading one of the two - I copied the TC bootloader to an additional partition (unencrypted, /boot) where GRUB files lie, and I chainload to it. I'm dual-booting my laptop (on a single hard drive): Windows Vista (TC full system encryption, don't remember exact version but it was the latest about 6 months ago) and Ubuntu 10.04 (fully encrypted with LUKS, on which I type right now). I've seen some TC discussions here and thought people might have some advice.

This is my first post to the forum, unfortunately it's a call for help.

Absolutely useless garbage merges microsoft ntfs