Corrupted HD cannot boot windows

[Russ Ferbrache]

I was loading a driver for my DVD RW after recently
installing XP (for a seventh time in 3 months-I have a
memory problem and cannot determine if it is RAM, on my
motherboard, or hard drive, or graphics card) and I loaded
the CD into my CD RW instead of my DVD RW. After realizing
this I removed the CD from the CDRW and placed it into the
DVDRW. Then of course I got the error that I needed to
place the disk back in, but it gave me the option to
cancel, so I did. Again and again, but it wouldn't go away-
then I tried to restart to get rid of this and start over,
but the shutdown window disappeared less than a second
after appearing. So I ctrl-alt-del and brought up task mgr
and click restart from the shutdown drop down. My PC
rebooted, then started loading windows, but a blank screen
appeared with only my mouse cursor. After 30 seconds my PC
rebooted and again, cursor/blank/30 sec/reboot. I tried to
boot from my XP CD and repair, it claims my hard drive is
empty (had about 20 gigs used, 60 free) and warns the
partition is corrupt so I need to format. I am able to use
the repair through the dos shell and have tried to bootcfg
and rebuild, but rebuild advised chkdsk must be completed
successfully priot to rebuild so I do this and it is ok,
but rebuild still says it cannot perform. I then ran
bootcfg /add but after trying to boot from the HD same
result (i.e. blank/mouse/30 sec/reboot). By then I was
sorely tempted to use the monitor on the CPU to test my
cases durability, but I am not independently wealthy so
had to get some sleep as it was 3 am and I had to work.
Any suggestions? I am not that familiar with the help
options in the recovery dos shell. Any advice would be
appreciated.

 

[Michael Solomon \(MS-MVP Windows Shell/User\)]

That partition is gone, you have no options but to start from scratch:
Assuming your system is set to boot from the CD-ROM drive, boot with the XP
CD in the drive. If it isn't or you are not sure, you need to enter the
system's BIOS. When you boot the system, the first screen usually has
instructions that if you wish to enter setup press a specific key, when you
see that, do so. Then you will have to navigate to the boot sequence, if
the CD-ROM drive is not first line, set it first in the boot sequence. Save
your settings and exit with the XP CD in the drive. The system will reboot.

A few screens into the boot process, if you see the message on the boot
screen to "Press any key in order to boot from the CD," do so.

After loading drivers and files, you should be taken to a screen with
the following:

To Setup Windows XP now, press ENTER.
To Repair a Windows XP Installation using Recovery Console press R.
To Quit setup without installing Windows XP, press F3.

In your case, press ENTER.

Agree to the License agreement by pressing F8.

You will then be taken to a screen with two options.

To repair the selected Windows XP installation press R.
To continue installing a fresh copy of Windows XP without repairing,
press ESC.

This will bring you to a partition map where you
can delete, create and format partitions.
Select the drive you wish to format, delete the partition, then create a new
partition, format as desired and continue with XP installation.

If you need the data on your hard drive, first, if your partition was
formatted NTFS, a DOS shell is useless as it can't access an NTFS drive.
The only thing you can do is try to find a service this restores files from
damaged hard drives, you can find many such services in the back pages of
many computer magazines.