Failure to Boot ... Oh No!

[Guest]

About 4 months ago I bought a new multimedia PC for home use, with TV card DVD etc etc .. brilliant
About 4 weeks ago the machine failed to boot and only got to the 'Windows is starting up' screen, however on reboot it worked fine. A few days later it took 2/3 reboots after getting stuck at the same place, before it booted properly. So the progressive worsening has culminated in complete failure and leaves me at the 'Windows is starting up' screen
I have run some utilities software that told me the disk is fine and so are boot sectors etc etc. When I access the DOS prompt I don't see any of the expected sublibraries, only a /recover library with factory setting files in it

Is it possible that a substantial part of my c:\ drive has been wiped? I have never connected it to the internet or run dodgy software! I do not really want to reload Windows XP home because that will wipe my disk
Can anyone advise or recommend good recovery software or point to me to some good advice
Thanks

 

[neil]

If your filing system is NTFS then a standard bootdisk will not see the
files, native DOS cannot read NTFS.
Do you have a recovery disk with the system or a full copy of XP.???
If the latter look at this
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

Also if you have the full XP disk, boot from the CD and use the option for
the recovery/repair console, when you get to what looks like a DOS prompt
you will need to run the command FIXBOOT and/or FIXMBR. Put a /? after each
one first for a description of what they do.

Neil

About 4 months ago I bought a new multimedia PC for home use, with TV card DVD etc etc .. brilliant.
About 4 weeks ago the machine failed to boot and only got to the 'Windows

is starting up' screen, however on reboot it worked fine. A few days later
it took 2/3 reboots after getting stuck at the same place, before it booted
properly. So the progressive worsening has culminated in complete failure
and leaves me at the 'Windows is starting up' screen.

I have run some utilities software that told me the disk is fine and so

are boot sectors etc etc. When I access the DOS prompt I don't see any of
the expected sublibraries, only a /recover library with factory setting
files in it.

Is it possible that a substantial part of my c:\ drive has been wiped? I

have never connected it to the internet or run dodgy software! I do not
really want to reload Windows XP home because that will wipe my disk.