System not booting after running partition recovery

I am running on Windows XP Home edition and have the latest update of the Disk Director suite

When doing some general disk cleanup I accidentally deleted my data partition (from the control panel disk manager in Windows). The files were backed up, so no big deal, but I decided to try and recover the partition instead of restoring the backups.

I started up Acronis - which at first would not run, telling me it could not find any hard drives. This was taken care of by installing the latest update. When doing the initial startup checks (which I guess it do when you have a fresh install) it informed me that there were some sectors(at least I think it said sectors, might have been something else) that could not be read. I chose to 'ignore all' on this, and eventually it started up.

Then I processed with the 'Acronis Recovery Expert'. I had to use the manual option, but then it found the partition right away. I undeleted it, selected commit .... and then the fun started.

During the committing process XP crashed and presented a nice blue screen informing me that it had stopped whatever was happening to prevent my files and folders. It then stood for a while 'dumping physcial memory to disk' and when done with that shut the machine off.

When trying to boot after this the boot process goes on for a little while and then it reboots itself.

Anyone have any inputs on where to go from here? As I said, my data is backed up, but I had not backed up the system. I do not relish the thought of having to reinstall XP and all the software I had on there.

So far I have created a bootable Disk Director Cd, and my plan was to see if that could help, but I thought it might be a good idea to see if anyone had any better idea.

rgds,

Ole C.

 

A quick update to my initial message:

I created the Acronis disk as indicated and booted with it. All partitions were visible, even the data partition that initially got me into this. Browsing the partitions it appears that all files were in place, so basically everything appears to be ok, apart from that I can not boot Windows normally. It keeps rebooting on me.

Any pointers on how to make windows boot normally again. I guess booting from the XP system disk and run in rescue mode might help, but I am a bit worried that I might mess things up.

If it matters: I used to dual boot with Linux, using the boot manager that comes with windows XP. The reboot happens a little while after selecting Windows from this boot manager however.

rgds,

Ole C.

 

If you have TI (or another imaging program), you may want to create a backup image of your drive as it is now before you make any more changes.

If you got any sector errors, you may need to run chkdsk /r on the partition.

Do you have a BartPE CD? If so, you can run it from there.

Otherwise, you can boot from your XP CD, go into Recovery Mode and run it.

If there are bad sectors and you don't fix them, then a Repair Install of XP will probably result in the same problems.

You may also be having a problem with DD failing to work when the process starts and then it tries the next time, reboots, tries again, reboots, etc.

My personal preference is to not start any procedures in Windows that will require a reboot. If DD (or TI) says it will need to reboot, cancel the procedure and boot to the DD (or TI) CD to do it.