I have a problem with my computer. While I was playing a game, the game closed, and windows logged off and shutdown. Not sure how it happened but it did. When I turned it back on, it would not boot. It could not find the boot record on the hard drive. I have a set of six disks to boot windows XP, but I downloaded them in order to install XP. I'm afraid to use them because i dont know if using them will try to reinstall XP. I took the hard drive out of the computer and made it a slave drive on another computer just so i could backup all the files that i dont want to lose. However, when the drive is plugged into the other computer...it wont allow it to boot either. The second computer used Windows 98, and boots fine when the second drive is not installed. Once i put the crapped out drive in it, it gets to the point where it finds the boot records, but then it just hangs and does nothing.
Does anyone know of any thing that causes the boot files to be lost or deleted? Is this a known virus? Is there any way to get the files saved off the drive? I hope it's not a virus, because i just ran a compete system check 2 days ago. I ran AVG, Ad-Aware, and The Cleaner and neither AVG or The Cleaner picked up on any virus.
If anyone knows how to fix this, please help me.