Definitely haven't done anything to the disk. The process went as
follows:
- Busted disk was my boot drive with XP installed (call it Drive 1).
- Installed new blank drive (Drive 2) and swapped Drive 1 to be slave
drive
- Booted Windows XP from CD (so never booted into Windows after
swapping drives) and installed onto Drive 2
- Drive 1 was unreadable when Windows installation was finished, never
touched it, installed on it or anything during process. Showed up as
"Bad" under the disk management software
- Removed Drive 2 and put Drive 1 back as master disk and attempted to
boot from it and got "Bad Partition" error.
- Booted from Windows XP CD into recovery area and ran chkdsk which
identified a bad partition and boot problem
- Ran FixBoot which worked, but stated that the drive was FAT32 which
it definitely never has been since I bought it and installed it myself
when I built the system and it had Windows XP installed from new as
NTFS
Now stuck in this predicament. The data is definately still there as I
can see loads of folders, but their names and files are all corrupted.
Everything I have read on FixBoot is about it sorting out NTFS boot
problems, so I was incredibly shocked when it declared it was writing a
FAT boot onto the disk.
Would appreciate any further suggestions, otherwise I am going to try
FixMBR or the other alternative I was thinking about was deliberately
wiping the boot sector and using a software solution to recover the
data from the NTFS areas.
Thanks