Xp Was Not Booting And Fixboot Messed Up Partitions

Hello all!

I have a computer with WinXP, in this computer I kept all the data I would wanted to keep through out the past 10 years.

Today I stated the winxp computer and it was stuck in the booting screen, I used a bootable CD to check that all my data was there and it actually was, partitions C (OS) and D (even more data) were there and readable. I found an article online which said to run fixboot from the recovery console from the windows CD to finx winxp booting issue, it did that and it fixed nothing, in fact it messed up the partitions and I can't see the data that was there before.

C drive is gone, and D drive was assigned to the DVD drive. Running a management tool in this booting CD it looks like there are 2 partitions with sizes similar as the ones I had before but there are no letters assigned to them and 100% free, so no data was detected, which I am freaking out about it, because I cannot see the data there.

After that, I restarted the computer and it gives me the message saying something like rtlnt file is missing, now i can't see any data in the computer even though the partition seem to be there but I can't access any of the data or find online anything to fix it with my very limit knowledge in computers.

I never selected any option to format or delete or anything like that so the information should be there but right now I can't reach it. So I guess the first thing is to recover the partitions and the data in them and then to fix WinXP

Where can I go from here to at least recover the data I had, or even better to fix it all and boot winxp as it used to do.

I really need from you guys. Thank you

 

Possible that all this is related to a failing hard disk so you are right - recovering your partitions is the priority. I have used the Partition Wizard Bootable CD successfully for this on several occasions. Good luck!

 

After using Partition Wizard to recover your partitions, make sure to place your data files on a second, external drive. Partition Wizard has excellent help instructions if you need them.

Windows XP requires you to:

fixboot
fixmbr
fixboot again

I needed to do this several times when I was dual-booting XP and some distro of Linux to get back to XP only.