crashed harddrive recovery ?

[cmaos]

gday
my laptop suddenly went kablamo
i get a missing system file error on booting up . dos doesnt show any of my partitions or anything , c:\dir only shows the command options
but when i load partition magic , that shows my drives AND it shows that there is used space there (the same volumes as my data) ?? does this mean my data is still in there somewhere , how can i recover it maybe ??
any help would be appreciated
cheers

[Ranger Bob]

What operating system are you running?

[cmaos]

i am/was running xp pro sp1

p4 3.0
30g

thanks again

[icecube]

You have hibernation active on the laptop go to

http://www.k7v.com/forum/k7v-bios/data/6961.shtml

here is a cut and paste of part of the repair:

You can boot to the XP cd and when you see the Welcome to setup press the letter R
You will get a dos prompt
Then type "chkdsk /p" without the quotes and hit enter
When that is done type "fixboot" and hit enter
"Y" and enter at the prompt
Then type "exit" and hit enter
The system will now reboot into Windows

Once you get it up and running, disable hibernation

[cmaos]

thanks ppls
no good
i have the xp upgrade disk which wont boot but i can get to the console from win 2k pro disk
chkdsk /p then fixboot , y , exit -- reboot
but the same error
missing or corupt file \winnt\system32\config\system
i also tried chkdsk /r - same error
!!!!!
thanks again

[icecube]