I have C&D in my hard drive. I formatted and scanned drive C where I have Win XP resides using DOS. I checked the drive to see I have any files, I did not see any. The system got booted to Win XP when I re-started the computer. I did not put Win XP CD in the drive. Just a normal re-boot as usual. Any idea?

One another thing the files I had in my D drive all got wiped out. How do I get it back.
Joseph

did you format C ? windows automatically puts the active drive as C

If you want to completly format the drive use your XP disc and do a full format.

to recover deleted files you could try this http://www.snapfiles.com/get/restoration.html

I did format drive C where the win xp resided once. When booted the system after formating and scanning process, the XP starged automatically without CD.
Joseph

if your PC starts up XP then somehow it must have not been erased .

what did you have on drive D ?

if you have both c and d on the same hard drive when you formatted the hard drive you will have lost them i dont think you can get them back

sorry

hope this helps

If you have a full version XP CD, boot it & follow the prompts for a Clean Install.

Good guide here: http://michaelstevenstech.com/index.html

The XP CD will do all the formatting. Probably little you can do to recover data but here is another possible tool:
http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm

Was this originally an OEM installation? If so there is sometimes a hidden recovery partition which maybe where XP is starting from.

If you are re-installing from a full version XP CD then just let it format the whole drive.

Thanks for your reply, I had some jpg files on drive D. I used a file recovery software to retrive some files. But files do not open using any graphic/photo software. I get the message files damaged/not a drawing file. It looks the file headers are missing. Any idea to restore them.
Joseph