URGENT HELP! i have buggered my computer... plz read

[David G]

Hey there. Hmm well, i have done some damage to my
computer. I was on my account and decided to delete
another account which i did through User Accounts under
control panel. it asked if i wanted to keep that
account's files and i told it to delete them. i know that
that account was around 2Mb in total. i noticed that my
computer was taking too long just to delete a 2Mb account
and became curious. i then noticed that my desktop icons
where disappearing. i guessed it was my computer
refreshing the desktop or something like that but i had a
feeling it was deleting them. i went and looked at
c:\documents and settings and noticed that when i clicked
properties of my account it said 2Mb instead of 2Gb. i
then hit my reset button to stop it deleting those files.
i am certain that i was removing another account and not
the one i wanted to keep. Okay, now my computer wont even
start up. i recieve the message "NTLDR is missing, press
ctl alt delete to restart". i read that this is a file
needed to start up windows. i then used my boot disk and
now all i can do is accesss a:. when i try to change to
c:, it says Invalid Drive Specification but i also
noticed it said the same for d: (my CDROM drive). my BIOS
detects my hard drive perfectly. i was wondering what you
think? is my hard drive corrupt? is there a way i can get
my computer to detect c: in the command prompt at the
start? or is there a problem with my drive? thanks for
reading

 

[Sean]

try running reinstall or system restore from the xp cd, im
not sure whats its called havent used it yet
sean

 

[dave]

yea, unfortunately i dont have the windows XP CD and i
dont get far enough in startup to do a system restore

 

[Alex Nichol]

Hey there. Hmm well, i have done some damage to my
computer. I was on my account and decided to delete
another account which i did through User Accounts under
control panel. it asked if i wanted to keep that
account's files and i told it to delete them. i know that
that account was around 2Mb in total.

I think that was the Documents and Settings\AllUsers that you managed to
delete. That contains those desktop and start menu items that are
available to everyone - you see the sum of those and your personal ones.
With luck you may have got them into the recycle bin - open that up and
restore everything in it.

And before you bother - System Restore will *not* help, It explicitly
does not cover user files, so that if you recover a system problem with
it you do not throw away your own files in the process
..