Oh lol. Just torrent windows and use the windows key on the bottom of your notebook to wipe the hard drive and start over. Or use linux to wipe the drive and continue on with that.
And yes, you did kill your mbr. As long as you can still boot to the bios, you are fine.
As for a comprehensive knowledge on disks..........uhhhhhhh.........shrug.
The best I can think of is a bunch of server certification books. The problem is they all teach you different things for different reasons.
I would think that researching linux from scratch might be an interesting way to get your hands on some information.
And you can forget about the programs. They are all nothing more than front ends to some basic commands. If you can learn the commands you will have essentially learned all those programs at one time.
As for file systems, here are the only ones that matter.
NTFS: Windows file system. Its pretty much as basic as it gets. Pretty much all operating systems can read it. The only downside is that it really does not manage hard drive space very well. So you get things like performance slow downs and vanishing hard drive space. Thats why you end up doing things like disk defrag. You are basically doing the file systems job for it.
EXT4: This is the vanilla linux file system. It can not be read by windows or OSX without extra programs/software. But the nice thing is that it manages disk space pretty darn well, so performance stays consistent.
HFS: OSX file system.............just dont use it : D. No seriously, even apple developers are not a fan.
FAT32: This is probably the most universal file system. It is old as dirt and has become the universal standard for read and write support. The catch is that the file size limit is 4GB. So if you wanted to move around a big ISO file like windows, you can not use fat32.
exFAT: pretty much a direct replacement for fat32. It has lots of support and does not have the 4GB file limit, but for some reason it has not caught on to be THE standard. You will want to use this for external drives or maybe even a storage drive if you want to share it with multiple OSes.
Swap: only reason it matters is because it sets up a small portion of your hard drive as extra ram in case your system requires more ram than what you have. This is only really applicable to linux.
There are plenty more file systems, but quite frankly....they all suck. BTRFS is prone to corruption in the case of a sudden power loss, XFS is kinda slow (but its catching up to EXT4 so who knows), and zfs only really matters if you are making a nas or some type of server.