Hi guys, here is the situation.

I have a work computer that I need to nuke and re-install XP on and a small server computer that runs 2k pro that I keep data on. The backup computer has been off for about 2 months but I fired it up to transfer some files from my work computer. It booted up fine and then I began to copy my files over. The files were going to take about 2-3 hours to transfer and so I went out of the house for a bit. When I returned I found that my backup computer had rebooted and that it could not find the ntldr.

1. I tried to repair the windows installation but it told me that the C: Drive was unformatted.
2. I then went to the recovery console and tried the fixmbr command and the fixboot command. Neither did any good. I just learned about these two commands so I am not too familiar with them but did them anyways.
3. I then used my windows recovery disk in the recovery process but that only brought up a few directories . It seemed that C: was readable again but i still could not boot up windows.
4. I ran a diagnostic utility on the drive (a long scan) and that came up fine
5. I then ran testdisk but that didnt find my old partition.

I am really pissed off only in that I have to re-install everything after hours of research. The good thing is that I did not have much data on the backup computer at this time because late last year I re-installed win2k on it so it did not have all the files on it.

Can someone let me know what they think went wrong and how in the future I can recover my data? It is very annoying LOL.

By the way, should I have run the recovery disk before running the partition diagnostic tool testdisk?

thanks.