Vista - The disappearance of local disk (D:) after full system recovery in Vista Home Premium

Lesson learned the hardway: After accidentally deleting a number of bios settings, and receiving an error message that read: Your Operating Sytem is missing., when simply trying to change the boot sequence order of my OS, I reinstalled Windows Vista Home Premium with the OS disk and the apps. and drivers from the recovery disks I had made shortly after purchase. I was not aware that running this utility would delete the contents of local disk (D:)drive permanently even after complete system restore. My question is: I now have a local disk (D:) drive with capacity 9.79GB listed in my computer where it should be, and inside I see a BOOTSEC.BAK file size 8k as the only contents. What am I supposed to do with this file? And what should be done about the 8+GB space left in this drive?

Are you sure it only has that file in it the files could be hidden. Have you checked the properties for the drive too. When you installed from the recovery discs it should have copied all the files from the discs into there.