MAJOR PROBLEM: C: drive formatting damaged?

[Michael]

I have a major problem on my Win XP Pro machine.

After installing Avast antivirus and performing a full system scan, I
uninstalled Norton AV. The uninstall required a reboot.

The reboot resulted in a blue screen which indicated that a file had
been deleted without properly shutting down the process or application.
The system did its memory dump and then shut down. Upon reboot, I got
an "unable to load operating system" message.

I put the XP cd in and booted from that. Tried the repair console,
which did nothing. Drive D: (separate physical drive) appears fine.
C: comes up as invalid drive designation.

If I try a reinstall of the O/S, I get a message that partition and
format of C: are unknown and to install windows I must format the c:
drive, wiping out any information that was there.

Is there any way at this point to recover my c: drive or am I screwed?

 

[DL]

multi posted, allready responded to in general

 

[FeMaster]

Give this a try, it won't hurt anything, whether it works or not... It
worked for me when a perfectly good HD suddenly turned up as an Unformatted
drive...

Restore the Master Boot Record (MBR)
http://www.cyberwalker.net/columns/sep98/090398.html

 

[POP]

And: Learn about multi-posting and cross-posting! Multi-posting
is a big NO NO!

 

[Michael]

And: Learn about multi-posting and cross-posting! Multi-posting is a
big NO NO!

Oh no....the usenet police!