Very useful program to boot up my XP without any programming knowledge
I had the same problem before didn't able to repair my C: drive using XP CD, and I didn't want to format my drive either. I received all kind of error message after accidently renamed all my drives' name and defraged my drives with errors and power outage (really bad luck).
After 2 days (I mean really 48hrs) searching online trying all kinds of possible rescues. I finally got back most of my data (not all as I'm still trying now in day 2). And I really feel that people are so kind to share their expertise to help the others on this problem (especially those who made the program and let people use it for free, like
PTedit.exe and
TestDisk.exe, they should really get credits).
I tried Norton Antivirus 05 rescue bootable disks and hope it would fix my drive somehow but no luck on that (or it did, but I just didn't notice, cuz still unbootable after that). Later I tried Partition Magic 8 resuce disk (you have to have PartitionMagic to make that resuce floppy) and once it loaded in DOC, it realized there's error in my boot drive and fixed the partition table. So I tried to reboot but still XP didn't bootup. But this time I was able to repair my XP using XP CD (repair XP I don't mean using "Automated Recovery Console" which is kinda technical, even I did try some comment like fixboot, fixmbr. Luckily I didn't erase all my data in my drive. I suggest try this at last after you have tried all I said in this message) I mean using XP CD to boot and don't hit "R" for repair, instead hit "Enter" to install XP, go to lincese agreement page, press F8, then you MIGHT have the option to "repair previous version of Windows" or "just F3 to quit". If you don't see the repair option, try to use TestDisk.exe, which I mention above, or PTedit.exe (which is downloadable for free and included in Nortion Antivirus Resuce Disk and PartitionMagic 8 resuce disk)to modifiy the PartitionTable, change the "Type" to 07 (which means unhide NTFS, You can find your TYPE using "set type" button in PTedit if you use other format instead of NTFS).
After that I was able to boot to Windows XP but my other 3 drives are gone. After this I found the TestDisk.exe (I wish I found this before, it might have fixed everything in the first place) and it fixed two of my drives. I give up on the third one since there's only some songs in that drive. Only problem is some of my programs don't run anymore and I think I have to reinstall them. But I think a better way is to format all my drive and reinstall everything again after I save the data that I need.
Hope this will help you. :angel: