weird partition problem, Please help!

I did a hard reset on my pc tonight only to not be able to boot back into windows xp, i was recieving a sudden flash of a blue screen with some text and an instant reboot, so i went into my dual boot of vista to see whats up.
i thought my hard drive had died.

its 250 GB SATA drive, It was partitioned.
The non OS partition is there, intact and working.
The partition that had my XP OS and some very vital and important files on it, Shows up as being there, but does not work. i cannot access it. it displays no info as in size or anything else but a drive letter, in disk management it says its there (after waiting forever for it to load), says its size and thats its 100% free on space.
Properties, which took one hour to pop up, says it has 0 space and 0 free space.
i need to recover files badly from this partition.
and i also just need this to work again, can a partition of a hard drive DIE seperatley from the other partition?
or am i in the twilight zone here cause i dont know what happened, what to do and ive never heard of or seen this problem.

 

On earlier setups, Start-run-cmd then type fdisk \mbr -enter- can reset the partition table and locations of the partitions, so that the boot manager can find the OS. I assume you have a preliminary screen asking which OS to boot to. Not tried this on an ailing Vista system, yet, so not sure if it will wake it up.

And yes, a single partition can become corrupted on a multi-partitioned drive.