I had windows running on C: and was having bootup problems so I decided to run winxp installation CD and tried to recover/repair whatever I have on c: windows. The repair didn't help much, as the boot up just goes back and forth, hence, I opted to install a new windows on drive D: (so that I can access the important files I have on C:) Prior to doing the reformat, I made sure that I only chose drive D as the new destination for windowsXP; however, upon bootup on windows D:\ I can't find all my important files on drive C: not even the old windows directory. What could've happened? Did it just delete all my important files?? Please help. Badly needed to recover them. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

What if anything is left on c? In the xp setup, what exactly did you do to make sure that it only installed on d?

Hi bmustillrose! I have to HDs. Drive C: has 160gb and drive D: has 20gb. I couldn't boot up windows on C: so I booted up on WinXP CD and decided to reformat. Then I saw C: and D: options, I made sure I highlighted D: then chose quick NTFS format. Prior to the format however, there was a message that said "C: drive may be corrupt or damaged" but D: drive was still highlighted. Then I went ahead and reformatted D: in the hopes that I would have dual boot option even if C: is not reading windows at least I can recover the files in there.

I would guess the reason you were having boot up problems, was because your c: drive was gone to start with. You either got infected or deleted the entire drive.
Or in the process of reinstalling XP to the d drive, you formatted both drives before installing XP.

Hi,

Is the C drive and D drive on the same HDD as partitions? If yes then is it possible for you to take the HDD out of the machine and plug it into another computer as a slave drive. If you do this then you may be able to see both partitions and try to retrieve some data. Normaly when you specify to install on D then windows would not normaly touch any other drives/partitions. Can you still see the C drive in MyComputer, if you can then try right clicking on the drive, click properties, tools, error checking, put a tick in both boxes and let it scan.

hth.

scott

Unknown has caused an error in unknown and unknown needs to restart.

If you did accidentally format your C: drive and have files you need to recover, try this, http://www.runtime.org/ which is also advertised on this page at the top in bright orange.

XP Pro SP2
P4 2.4G/1024 DDR333 Nanya
ASUS P4S8X-X
ATI Radeon X1300 Pro
Toolman

ione, no need to repeat what you posted in your original post. So when you boot Windows what exactly do you see on C?

Life's more painless for the brainless.

Thank you all for your replies. I found the lost files by following Toolman's suggestion (still a work in progress). But will try to answer each of your question as it might help other people solve similar problems they might encounter in the future:)

HM_TEAM2003: Prior to C: crash, boot up sometimes works fine then this balloon message pops up that Windows\system32\ntoskrnl.exe might be corrupt or damaged. Hence I did windows setup.

SCOTTYUK30: Drives C: and D: are separate:)

TOOLMAN: Thanks for the link you gave me. I never knew such software existed. I'm impressed. Although it is too pricey but the program is powerful.

JENNIFER SUMN: From boot it prompts me to choose whether I'd like to boot by last known config, safe mode, c: prompt, etc. Tried everything but the system just goes back and forth to this selection.

I hope this information is useful. This is a great website. Thanks once again for all your help.

Glad I could help!!!

XP Pro SP2
P4 2.4G/1024 DDR333 Nanya
ASUS P4S8X-X
ATI Radeon X1300 Pro
Toolman

People can only help based on the information you give. Being specific and detailed is the only way to get good advice.