I very much need to perform a repair install on a damaged XP installation in a particular partition, but every time I try to run the repair, it ONLY lists the perfectly good XP installation for repair (the one I'm posting this from). The odd thing is, that damaged installation will actually boot in both full and safe mode up to a certain point where it hangs or crashes. So why won't the repair install feature recognize it as an XP installation that I can perform a repair on? And how do I force it to find it? It is mandatory that I get this damaged partition up and bootable, even if only for a few hours. Thanks!

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Don not try to force it. The partition information is not visible to the install program.
Windows XP has limited ability to recover a damaged partition. It may boot, but that accounts for maybe five percent of the stuff on the partition.
You need to make a "clone" backup copy of the hard drive. After that, try a third party program to find out why the partition is not visible. One popular program is found on www.Acronis.com, but I don't like it.
Do a Google on "recover lost partition" and you will find lots of sites that want to sell you a program that can both "clone" the HDD and repair the partition information. Some have free trials. And there are shops that do all it for a price. Next time use the Windows XP Backup system. It is not really hard to do.

Geek9pm

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Try an offline OS like BartPE, it may be able to see the partition so you can extract 
files from it.

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You might want to spend some cash and try Spin-rite from GRC.com, I hear from it's 
reputation that it works miracles






On Tuesday, April 22, 2008 at 1:16 pm, Dan Sarandrea, MCSE wrote:

>Try an offline OS like BartPE, it may be able to see the partition so you can extract 

>files from it. 

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