XP stuck during boot, recovery console unsuccessful

Hi, I have a homebuilt system with XP MCE SP3 patched, AMD Phenom X2 555 BE, Gigabyte GA-MA875-US2H, 4GB, WD Caviar Black 1TB (only about 6 months old) with one big partition. The computer has been running ok for the most part. Our son shut it down with the power switch, due to it hanging during login when his allotted time had run out. When I tried starting up again, it halted during the startup sequence, gave a blue screen, and reset. Safe mode got partway through startup, then stopped on one of the files with "press enter to continue loading xxxx" (I don't think it was particularly important which one). Windows recovery console did not have any Windows installations listed for login; it just went to a C:\ prompt. I tried DIR and it said the C: directory was corrupt. I saw an error about there not being a current command set available for the registry, but I do not remember exactly where. I tried fixboot, but it "could not determine the file system type" and it then proceeded to write a FAT12 partition to the drive. The drive shows up as the full size in the disk manager, but the I: drive is only about 10 MB with no files when you open it from Windows Explorer.
I tried EASEUS Partition Recovery, but it's only seeing the FAT partition, not the lost NTFS partition.
Before I try too many fixes on my own, I thought I would solicit opinions on the best way to proceed. While there is nothing really that critical on the drive that can't be reinstalled, that process will take some time to perform.
I could try a data recovery program to get the data files off before reformat/reinstall, but is there a good way to recover the file system to make this process go easier?
I have other machines available to run recovery software, and an external drive adapter to make this SATA drive into a USB interface model.
Comments/suggestions appreciated! Thanks!

 

Hi,

You can try Partition Wizard to see if it's Partition Recovery option can see the old partition. It gives a more extensive list of partitions than Easeus in default mode. I have had luck with it but I'm unsure if the 10mb partition might cause a problem.

For data recovery try powerdatarecovery. It won't do anything to repair the lost partition but will let you copy data. Be sure to check the box for "I am a home user" when starting the program or it will tell you that you need to pay for an upgrade to copy files.

 

Hi sach2,
Thanks for the suggestions. It was pretty much what I figured to do. In the end, I was unable to repair the disk, so I pulled the files off that I cared about with powerdatarecovery, reformatted/repartitioned/reinstalled WinXP MCE, and things are looking ok for now. Will have to see if this fixed the other weird problems like the graphics card driver constantly crashing, etc.