I recently had a major problem with my primary HDD on my work PC. It has months, even years of work on it along with many other important files. I am looking for advice on how to recover a boot sector or partition. The problem is as follows;
I put an old DVD drive into my PC (while it was turned off and unplugged).
As I loaded windows after doing this my HDD turned off then back on in rapid succession and the windows loading screen froze for about 4 minutes. I then restarted my PC.
Upon restart (with the DVD drive removed) the HDD turned on as normal and the Windows Loading screen began to come up. About half a second after this it froze, went to a blue screen and another second later restarted. The same happens if I restart, shut down and turn the power back on. If I load Safe Mode with or without command prompt it shows the text with each .sys file, can't find one and then restarts just as its about to change monitor modes and go into Windows.
I tried running a CHKDSK using Windows XP's recovery console but it had an error stating something along the lines of not seeing any partitions to check while in C: which is my primary partition.
I tried reinstalling windows onto an existing partition but Windows said that I first needed to delete the partition before continuing. However it did show the correct sizes for each of my partitions and did acknowledge their existence.
My specs are as follows:
Western Digital 200gig 7,200 RPM ATA-100 (or 133) HDD
Athlon X2 64 4400
BFG GeForce 7800Gt
ASUS A8N-SLI (I believe)
2 gig Corsair RAM
onboard sound & network
Up until this point everything including the HDD has ran perfectly fine and I suspect that it is not the HDD's fault. If anyone has had a similar experience or can offer some advice on how to check what might be wrong, or even fix it, please go ahead. I would be more then happy to recieve any help that I can get right now.

Hi and welcome to the forum,

Have you tried a set of utilities like this: http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ ? It will give you the opportunity to test out many of the major components and may give you a greater understanding of the problem.

Thank you for your advice. A friend of mine told me about that last night and I tried it. The only difference between the applications on that and windows setup was;

Active@ didn't know the size of the main partition on my HDD. It thought both partitions were FAT12 partitions which does not make sense as they were both part of a Windows XP dynamic disk which I thought was NTFS. They could see some files on them but they looked like small temp files, that perhaps the program had put onto the drive. This worries me.

Windows setup could see the size of each partition, but couldn't install an O/S onto either without reformatting both because they were part of a dynamic disk.

I am going to try installing an O/S onto a separate HDD, putting my dud one in and copying the files over. If this fails I will try to find a data recovery program so I can copy the entire contents of the drive over.

Hey senor

You hit the nail on the head, that is the best advice I could offer you, you shouldn't experience any problems doing this.

Let us know how you get on.

I have to wait another 20 hours before I have access to a spare HDD with enough room on it. I have one of my own but I lent it to a friend and he was awfully unreasonable about returning it so I'm going to stop that arrangement as soon as I have my main PC organised. Once I get a spare HDD I will post again saying how that went. Unfortunately, I will need to install Service Pack 2 first because my HDD is a dynamic disk but thats no big problem.