This afternoon, I installed Win XP SP3 on my Dell Inspiron 6000. Everything seemed fine, multiple reboots, a couple hours of it running normally. This evening Media Player crashed, and I couldn't get it to restart. It goes through the POST, and then I get a blinking cursor. I've had a look at this thread and while our problems seem similar, I think there are some important differences.
If I boot from a Windows CD, and go into recovery mode (pressing R in setup) I can't run CHKDSK at all - I get the following: "The volume appears to contain one or more unrecoverable problems." FIXMBR gives me the warning that "this computer appears to have a nonstandard or invalid master boot record." DISKPART shows me that there are two partitions, one of about 8 MB, obviously left over from a previous installation, and one for 76309 MB, all expected, except that it tells me that 76308 MB are free.
So, it seems clear that something has happened to the partition information, but I'm hoping that the data is still there... somewhere.
Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to go about recovering this data? I'm wondering if there is a way to manipulate Windows before trying the previously suggested Puppy Linux installation.
Thanks,
Brendan
Edited by bmshanley, 31 March 2009 - 07:07 AM.