Disk Crash Recovery

Perhaps this is not the right forum for this question and if not I hope someone will move it for me.

I have a PC that was upgraded last month from Windows ME to Windows XP Professional and I was running both McAfee Firewall and Virus Scan. Last week the hard drive seemed to crash and I could not boot up. When I try it tells me that my System file is missing. So the problem as I see it is that either some nasty virus got through my protection or the disk actually crashed. The hard drive is/was partitioned into C: and D: and from the so-called Recovery console I can do a Dir of D: but not of C:.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to recover?

Have you ran any kind of disk utilities to tell you if there are any problems with the hard drive? Did you upgrade the disk to NTFS?

Can you tell us exaclty what file it says is missing.

I might be a corrupt registry. I had a computer go like that one time and everytime it would boot up, it would say c:\windows\system32\system is corrupt or missing.

Hi,

My initial gut feel is that it is a software problem, rather than a hardware one, so it might be malware.

The upgrade from Me might be part of the problem. Have you tried a re-install and take the repair option? You might have to go into bios and change the boot sequence first to boot from the CD?

Your last resort will be to format the HDD and reload XP. This will tell you if the drive is damaged? As you were running Me, it is not a new drive?

What is the make and model of machine you are using?
Was the upgrade, an upgrade, or a new installation?

Cheers