TechSpot - PC Technology News and Analysis

I sincerely hope someone can help me out with this as I am frustrated beyond belief!

A friend asked me to reinstall XP and fix his laptop but before I did anything he wanted all of his photos backed up. There are 2 gigs worth of pictures. I was unable to tie his laptop into my network because it had no IP address whether connected wireless or hardwired (which is the original problem). So, I was unable to transfer his pics from one pc to another. The laptop has a dvd burner but for some reason that's not burning properly (previous issue...not my concern now) so I couldn't burn his pics to a disc or dvd. I tried using my son's mp3 player (512mb) but that took entirely too long and was a pain. Frustrated at last, I figured I would just create a new partition and just transfer everything to it. Now comes the major problem...

I installed and used Powerquest Partition Magic 8 to create the new partition. I've used the software many times before so as far as I knew everything was alright. After hitting the Apply button I walked away while it was to do everything. When I came back in, the laptop was off. I turned it on only to receive the screen where it asks to start in safe mode, safe mode w/ networking, last known configuration and start normally. I chose start normally and it loaded the XP boot screen then a quick blue screen error flashed across the screen much too fast to read. Believe me, I've repeated this so many times just to try and read it. I even got the camera out and tried to capture the screen with no luck. I tried each of the other options: safe mode, safe mode w/networking and last configuration all with the same result.

I loaded up Hiren's Boot CD and checked out the partition tools. I Used Norton Partition Magic Pro Server 8.05 and if you take a look at the attachment you'll see the results. I don't remember what it looked like before I tried to create a partition, though.

partitions.jpg

The 4996.7 partition is the Recovery partition and obviously the NTFS partition is the main partition (no unused space????). I've tried to delete the 7.8 and the extra 1004 but nothing seems to allow me to delete them.

I honestly don't know what to do or where to start. I've actually gotten a Seek Error 46 (or 42, can't remember) also. I know that's never good but I thought it may have been fixable or due to some other problem that I was getting the error.

Someone, anyone....please help. Not only am I stumped but I feel absolutely awful about possibly ruining my friends laptop and losing all of his pics.

Thanks in advance...

only thing i can recommend you is to connect laptop hdd to desktop, download easy recovery, and try to recover NTFS partition.
if you see BSOD during startup, try to press F8 during startup and check for string "do not automatically restart if error occurs" (or something like this)
then, you sholud see BSOD, check out of UNACCESSIBLE_BOOT_VOLUME string. if so, just boot from WindowsXP boot CD, call recovery console and type chkdsk c:
checkdisk will run and, i'm sure, will find some errors in file system. after checking, reboot, and check out of the normal OS booting.
post here about results.