Error while reading FAT on C:

My daughter’s computer froze up while on MSN MSGR. I got it going and cleaned out all the cookies, temp i’net files, docs, history etc. Rebooted and seemed ok. Next morning she logged on and froze again. I noticed she had deleted 23 files (mostly pics & audio) 132mb. Empty recycle bin was not an active option. I tried to delete manually and after a few min pause received “Disk write error, unable to write to drive c:” After shutting down and starting up again scandisk could not run or fix drive due to “Error reading FAT on drive C:” I tried booting from the startup disk & cd rom but no option to repair came up. Is their a way to repair the FAT without formatting and running FDISK?