Bad news reformat, drives reversed

I have a computer in trouble.

I bought a new motherboard, chip and graphics card and when I tried to boot up, the Windows splash screen stayed darkish and gave me the message there was new hardware installed.

I reformatted my C drive and reinstalled Windows and activated it and ran into two problems: one was errors whenever I tried to use, install or uninstall Malwarebytes. Everything else, including Windows updates appeared to be fine.

I went to Malwarebytes forum for help and found out I couldn't run bat files or register dll's, so I did a Repair install, which was successful. After that, I was able to reinstall Malwarebytes and it worked.

Unfortunately, someone warned that not being able to use Malwarebytes was a problem of a serious virus, so in a moment of panic, I thought since my OS is newly installed, I would just reformat and reinstall it again. No problem. Oh dear! (never mess with a working system!)

When I put in my XP CD to reformat, I noticed my drives were reversed. The D was now C and the C was now D. I could see this from the size. The original C drive was 40 gb and the original D drive was 90 gb. The XP CD said it found the OS on drive D which was the one with 40 gb, did I want to reformat, so I said yes, because it was the right size.

About 2/3 of the way through the new installation, I got a blue screen, tried again with the same result.

It was unable to complete the new installation of Windows and the only partition now recognized as the Pri Active partition is the drive with 90 gb, which has no OS on it. This means I can't boot anymore. I was able to get into it briefly with a boot CD, but it kept giving blue screens and running a variety of checks on the Memory.

Now I have some questions:

With my Partition Genie cd, I can see the partitions. They are listed as follows:

7.8 mb free space.
Then a Table which is called a Partition.
Then there's a non-designated area (no name given to it) of 40 gb (where my C drive used to be)
This is followed by a 90 gb primary active Partition
The last area is a Partition of 20 gb.

Is it possible using my Partition Genie cd, to reformat the area which is not designated with any name at all? Could this make things worse rather than better? I don't want to reformat the whole HD because I have a ton of data on it.

Alternatively, is there any way for me to gain access to the 20 gb partition at the end of the list and put the OS on that one? It's a small primary partition.

I'm very interested in recovering my data, possibly by slaving this hard drive, but would like to try and get an OS back on if this is possible.

Thanks for your help. I'm feeling pretty dumb, but fortunately, it's not the first time.

 

I think the best thing you can do, given the mess your system is in now, is to use a Linux live CD to copy your own files off of whichever of the two larger partitions they are on - if they still are! - and paste them onto the 20GB partition, where they should be safe from what comes next. For this I suggest you use an Ubuntu Live CD from http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/download. Burn it to CD and boot to it. You will find it quite straightforward to use.

Then use your XP CD to reformat both of the two larger partitions and install XP to the 40GB partition.

That should get you sorted.

 

Hey Earthling,
this sounds like a good idea! I've been wanting to learn Linux anyway, just been too lazy.
I'll let you know if I get the mess straightened out.