Windows continuously reboots, system drive seen as unpartitioned

[JasonR]

I rebooted my system yesterday after an uptime of several
days. I have Windows XP professional with SP1.

Now it continuously reboots. I hit F8 and tried every
single option, to no avail.

I read the Microsoft knowledge base article about how my
Kernel32.dll might be damaged, so I tried recovery
console by booting from my XP CD. Once I start recovery
console, it hands for about 20 minutes analyzing my
system drive. Finally, when it gets to the command
prompt, I have no access to my system drive, just my
other drives. Thus I can't do the kernel32 replacement.

I also went to installation just to see what it said
about my drives. It shows my system drive as
unpartitioned. Apparently I have had a virus delete my
partition tables, but I am almost 100% sure my data is
still there. What are my options?

 

[Michael Pardee]

I fear for the health of your hard drive. The last couple
times I have had hard drive death it appeared as loss of
partitions and bogus size reporting.

You can try reinstalling XP over your current
installation. From your description it will probably
complain about your disk not being formatted, and will
take you to the partition manager part of the setup. If
it shows the drive size being other than what you know it
to be, you're boned. If it shows the size right but the
partitions missing, Partition Magic (or similar) is your
only hope - and a faint one at that.

If you have a Windows 98 startup disk or similar, you can
also try rebuilding the master boot record by
typing "fdisk /mbr" at the command line. This is semi-
safe; if the drive is toast it will only make it toastier.

Mike