defrag problem.

[afcshabs]

I was defragging my computer...checked it was on 36%..when i went back to see if it had finished an hour later the computer had turned itself off. When i turned it on again it goes to the windows screen as if about to start and the goes to a black screen with details of starting it up in safe mode and saying windows did not start up. I have a old windows xp disc which i have tried to boot from but it keeps asking to format the drives which i think would wipe all the data etc from my pc. Can anyone help please.

[Allan]

Boot to the recovery console (boot to the xp cd and choose the first repair option) and run chkdsk /r
Then reboot. Tell us what happens.

[afcshabs]

It gives me two options.. select H:\I386 or H:\MiniNT. I selected the first and put in what you said and it came up.... The command is not recognized.

[Allan]

WHAT gives you two options?

[afcshabs]

Hi Allan,
I tried chkdsk /r again and this time it came up with ....The volume serial number is 425f-f05a and then said CHKDSK is checking the volume.....CHKDSK is performing additional checking or recovery.
It then finished and said it found 7296192 many kbytes total disk space and 3421004 kbytes are available with 4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
It then said 1824048 total allocation units on disk and 855251 allocation units available on disk.
It then went to H:\I386.

[Allan]

Do you have two windows installations? And why are you booting to h: drive??

[afcshabs]

Hi Allan,
I dont know why its gone to h drive. I just put the xp disk in the drive and thats where it took me.

As  you can see im not very good with computers .

[Allan]

Okay, your hd is apparently VERY corrupted. You can try slaving it to a drive on another system and try to retrieve the data. But I think in the end you are going to have to reformat it. Please feel free to wait for a second opinion.

[afcshabs]

Thanks for you help Allan.

[Allan]

Wish I could be of more help. Sorry.