Self-Induced "non-recoverable problem"

My problems started when I installed Symantecs Ghost 2003 on my new Windows XP based computer. I had painstakingly set it up just the way I wanted it and Ghost was just to provide short term backup until I could get a copy Acronis. MISTAKE, Ghost was incompatible with my 500gig SATA drive. It first created a virtual drive that locked up my system. After many frustrating hours I was able to delete the virtual drive but that was only half of my problem.
I still couldn't get the machine to boot off the hard drive. I created a partition, loaded windows and copied my files to an external drive and then set about trying to fix my problem. CHKDSK, FIXMBR, FIXBOOT, BOOTCFG, nothing seemed to help. It wouldnt boot off either partition. I went to the CMOS/BIOS and with the plan of finding a problem with the boot order but then I must have done something very wrong. Now MAP shows that I have a 55MBl Dell-installed FAT16 partition, the 2000MB NTFS partition that I created and my 473G C:\ partition with no structure shown. Apparently it is no long NTFS. CHKDSK /r reports it has a non-recoverable error. I think the integrity of the drive itself is o.k. since I had earlier run CHKDSK successfully.

So my question is: What did I do and can I undo it?

 

Hello hiddenhand, welcome to Major Geeks.



Post details of what happens when you try to boot, including the exact error messages.

It is important to know where the boot process reaches before failure.

 

On boot-up I get the normal Dell Screen with the bios number and the set-up and boot menu function keys info.

It then halts on the next screen which reads as follows:

Boot from CD:
No boot device available, Press ENTER key to retry
SATA-0: Installed
SATA-1: Installed
SATA-4: None
SATA-5: None

and then a blinking cursor.