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?