Messed up badly with recovery..

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First of all, I am not even close to a computer expert. Also, I'm using XP.

I had a problem with my computer where, anytime the computer turned on, it would continually restart. As a solution, I thought a recovery may work. F10 led me to PC-Doctor for Windows PE. The recovery brought me back to the original setup for the computer, making me believe that everything has been wiped. While going through the setup, my computer restarted randomly. Now, the computer resets, comes up with the message "Windows did not install correctly. Please run setup again" or something similar to that. After clicking OK, it instantly restarts the computer and has the same message. It's in an infinite loop now and I can't get it to start up. I want to run the recovery again, but I fear that, if a backup file or something was created, it will be deleted with another recovery.

Does anyone know how to break this loop and if there's any hope of getting my files back? Thank you.
 
making me believe that everything has been wiped.

So, it's not clear.... Did you reformat your hard drive? Did you do a quick or full reformat?

If you didn't reformat see [post=766270]How to recover your folders/files when Windows won’t boot[/post]

If that doesn't help or you did a quick reformat you can try a data recovery tool like TestDisk

If you did a full reformat, you can still attempt any data recovery but the odds are slim
 
I'm guessing full, but I really can't say I'm 100% sure. PC-Doctor for Windows PE only gave me one recovery option, just recover. Took about half an hour and left the PC in a setup state. Also, thanks for the options, though I still can't seem to get out of this error message loop.
 
I'm guessing if you create a bootable CD then change your BIOS boot order (or your computer might have an F-key to give you a boot menu) you only need tell it to boot from CD and not hard drive to try recovery attempts.
 
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