Partmgr.sys crashed my Notebook HDD

Just some ideas that may help. Did you check the BIOS to be sure it is set to boot to CD first? Since it won't boot the XP cd try booting to the Ultimate Boot CD which you can download or if you have a floppy drive try booting to a floppy. Try removing the hard drive from the laptop and connecting as a 2nd hard drive in another computer, you can get laptop to desktop hard drive adapters for just a couple of dollars. I have also booted to Ghost with CD burning and burned to the CDR. Also, there are some data recovery tools you can download for free or little cost that you could try or you can bite the bullet and send it out to a data recovery company but that is very expensive.

Well the first thing is to pull the HDD and fit it to a desktop computer where you can work with it. You'll need to see if it is seen by BIOS as a drive at all and if it is when loaded can Windows see the drive and read it or more importantly the E Partition. If it is unreadable and there are no petitions showing you'll need to make up your mind as to what the data on the drive is worth as you only generally get one shot at it and if you muck it up the Data Recovery Companies have that much more of a hard time in recovering your data which you'll be paying for.

Generally speaking you can pickup a copy of X Ways Davory for around 42 Euros and that will recover the data but you'll have to fit the drive to a different computer maybe in a USB caddy and write the data to another HDD as you NEVER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES write recovered Data to the drive that it is coming off as you'll overwrite other data in the process.

If you do not mess with the drive you can get the data recovered for around ! to 3 K AU if the drive is working and anything more if it isn't or you mess with it and make it harder for the company to recover your data.

In one case where Forensic Data Recovery was applied the cost was 100 K AU for that service but it was used by the Police for a Pedophile in a Court Case so it was money well spent.

But first make sure that the drive is actually working by fitting it to another computer and try reading it or see if it is recognized at all the cheapest way of doing this is to buy a USB to 2.5 Inch caddy and plug it into another XP, 2000 or 2003 OS computer or even a computer loaded with Linux which can read the NTFS partitions.

hard disk problem . have the disk taken out . try to get it work on a pc . if you can reach it ( access the disk ) reinstall keeping the old partition table and file systems . just install drive c when you put it back on the notebook if you plan to trust and use this disk . if I were you I would reinstall on a pc , save disk partition e and kiss goodbye to the failing disk.

In cases like this< I will usually attempt to first connect the hd to my portable harddisk casing, and then attempted to rescue all the data in E:\

Check your bios to ensure that you can boot from CD

I am not sure this is going to help you but I had the same thing happen to my system witn W2K on it. I tried everything under the sun to get that data off and could not do it. I recevied an estimate of $2,000.00 for a service company.

The recovery procedure from Windows sucks and I could not get the data that way.

I was able to reboot my machine from a Norton bootable virus CD and there was my D partition with all my data. My C was toast.

I bought a new HDD, intalled a new OS on it, bought an UBS external case for my bad HDD, connected it and I had all my data.

Here is the easiest solution.
Go online and purchase an IDE to usb device for under $20 then pull the HDD from your laptop.
Attach the laptop HDD to the IDE portion and the USB portion to another computer/laptop.
It will show up as another drive and you can use either windows or DOS prompt to copy your files to the working machine.

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