Recover Win7 NTFS boot partition after image xfer nukes the MFT

Chronology:

1) Win7 x64 Ultimate on internal Kingston SSDnow V+ series 512GB SSD on Lenovo ThinkPad W510. External WD6400BEVT 640GB drive and Samsung HM100UI 1TB in external enclosures. WD drive was previously, successfully imaged from the OEM 360GB HD in the ThinkPad. First of three replications is to be the WD to the Samsung, both external.
2) Queue up the imaging, click on commit changes, machine reboots, nothing on the screen except a garbled line of multi-colored whatever at the top of the screen. This goes on for many, many hours.
3) Finally give up the ghost and power off machine, re-boot, invalid system drive error on Win7.
4) Try to boot w/Win7 platter and repair the internal boot drive, no success.

Using any number of tools (Easus, Disk Internals, Active File Recovery, etc, including Acronis) recovery software sees none to over a hundred NTFS partitions on the nuked hard drive. At this juncture, I've re-installed from scratch on a 750GB WD Scorpio Black drive I have with the original ThinkPad platters and just want to get as much data as I can off the trashed drive. Questions:

1) Why in THE h^ll would ADD even nuke the boot drive when the imaging was working on two external HDDs in enclosures? And I do mean nuked.
2) If it all possible I would like to get the MFT on the partition back "pre-nuke" and actually be able to see my original directory structure and files. Barring that,
3) After playing with at least a dozen different recovery tools, I'm looking at springing the $$$ for Easus Data Recovery Wizard 5.01 and getting back what I can. Problem with that is I'll get the numeric incremental file names for .DOC files, etc that I'll have to look at individually to figure out what's what. The original purpose of the imaged external 640GB WD was to have a second bootable HD for when I'm on the road if things went south and to copy my data from the internal Kingston to. I haven't lost a lot of data, but there's a few dozen files (namely my Outlook .PST) totaling about 5GB I'd like to get back if possible.

Recommendations, thoughts?

Thanks in advance.