Hardware

First, my condolences.

Second, Windows Me cannot read a drive formatted as a NTFS volume. NTFS is the default drive format for Windows XP.

In order to retrieve files from your drive you will need to mount it as a slave in a PC running Windows 2000 or XP.
Alternately, you can get utilities that allow Me to read a NTFS drive.

As to your original problem, my first suggestion would be to boot from your Windows XP CD and see if you can perform a repair installation.
Or, you could just re-install Windows. You would need to install updates and your applications. But, your files should be intact.

Chas

2 things to try before doing a reinstall. It sounds like your boot record or boot sector was corrupted during your power outage.

First, try fixing the mbr (master boot record). Boot into the recovery console and type fixmbr. Reboot when prompted.

If that doesn't fix the problem boot back into the recovery console and type fixboot. This will repair the boot sector. Reboot and try again.

If neither of these fix the boot problem then follow TheChas' recommendation and do a reinstall. You should get a message asking you if you want to repair an existing installation or creat a new one. By repairing the existing installation you should retain your current configuration, including applications.

Here's a couple of links explaining fixmbr and fixboot:

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/bootcons_fixmbr.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/bootcons_fixboot.mspx

Cheers.

RW

A NTFS partition WILL show up as an unknown type to Windows Me, 98, or DOS.

Here is a link to a NTFS driver:

http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/ntfswin98.shtml

I tend to agree with your diagnosis that at least the XP partition is corrupt. If so, you may not be able to get any files off of the drive short of using file recovery utilities, or a file recovery service.

Remember, if the files are valuable, the more you do to the drive, the more it will cost to recover files.

Chas

It looks as if there is a drive letter mixup when you boot with your good w2k installation. This could be because you have 2 drives marked as "active" in your system. I fyou had primary and extended Partitions on one disk, and the same on another, then the primary partition on your master disk will show up a drive "C:" and the primary partition of your slave disk will show up as drive "D:". The way the logical drives in the extended partitions show up is not clearly structured.

Now if you have a primary partition on your good 2k system, but win2k itself was installed on drive d of the same disk, and you have now added your bad drive to the system, your win2k drive d will change to drive e.

What you can try to do is use a drive partitioning utility like partition magic, which you can also run from a set of 2 floppys, and change the primary partition of the bad drive to a logical partition. If you boot again with win2k you the win2k partition should now stay at drive d.

If that doesn't help or you don't have access to partition magic, reject this answer and ask for more help.

I don't think the drive is bad. If your mbr and boot sector are not corrupt then the registry was probably corrupted when you lost power and you have it set to auto-reboot on system failure (the default for xp). If you have system restore turned on you can recover to a previous restore point from the recovery console. See this ms article:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;q307545

If you want to see the actual message that is causing the reboot you will need to edit the registry from the reconvery console and change the auto-reboot setting. This will not fix the problem but it will send you to the bsod with the error that is causing the system to fail. You will need to use reg.exe and manually type in the regkey and value to add/modify. You can use reg.exe to query the key to see what it is currently set at and then modify it if appropriate. Here's the key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CrashControl

It's a dword and if set to 1 auto-reboot is enabled. If set to 0 then it is disabled.

Cheers.

RW

If you have enough drive space on the ME HD. This recovery program (to copy file from NTFS to fat file system) works very well, although it does show long files names with the ~1 etension.
File is called READNTFS.

http://www.ntfs.com/products.htm

After recovering the data you could fdisk and reinstall XP.

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