Recovery Console doesn't recognize C:\

I'm on an HP Pavilion Desktop


Harddrive: Maxtor 6L200M0 200 GB
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3500 +
RAM: 615 DDR
Windows XP Professional ( No SP )

I had used a copy of Win XP Professional to repair install about a week ago and everything was working fine until I attempted to install the Service Pack 2 upgrade because a program I was attempting to install required it. The install was going fine until about halfway through when it got stuck on the sp2.cab file saying it could not copy it. I checked to make sure the file was actually in the directory and it was. I ended up having to cancel the install and then windows proceeded to shut itself down. When I tried to reload it came up with the Hal.dll error. And I decided to try to do another repair install. When I loaded the repair install, It showed my C:\ ( Where my windows installation s ) as having an Unknown file system and incorrectly displayed the storage space of the drive ( It listed the correct total but, showed that there was no used space. ) When I attempted to continue an install anyway I was not prompted with an option to repair but only with one to format and clean install.

After some research I attempted to load the recovery console and see if I could run chkdsk but when the recovery console comes up it only lists the HP recovery partitions and not the C:\ itself.

Right now I am booted from UBCD4WIN and I can access my C drive just fine, on here it's listing the correct drive space and all.

I'm not sure what to do next, I've already backed up most files I really want to keep.

 

Hi and welcome to the forum

First thing I notice is that you have a 200Gb hard drive and an original XP. Bad mix . SP1 and later came with native support for drives larger than 137GB, 48-bit LBA. Slipstreaming a Service Pack onto your XP CD may be the best way to move forward.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;303013

http://www.winsupersite.com/xp/sp3_slipstream.asp

 

Okay, I will try this...And see what I can do. And sorry about posting on the other thread earlier.

 

No worries

Good luck.