HELP corrupt parition table

[cjolley]

ARGHHHHHH...
So my brother in law calls and tells me his computer won't boot.
I try to walk him through a repair install of XP on the phone and get nowhere.

Then I put in my XP cd to walk through the setup menues to find where the repair install choice is.
It isn't there so I exit install and reboot my computer.
Now mine wont boot!!!

Here is what I know:
1, the install cd was an original xp cd
2, my drive is a 300gig seagate
3, my xp was installed using a slipstreamed sp2 cd
4, norton now reports that I have a single fat16 partition of ~134gb

Would the xp installer really overwrite my partition table without asking?

What is the latest and greatest for rebuilding a corrupt partition table?
I have fixed things like this with partiton magic before, but my copy is very old.

Any advice?
(besides not taking computer repair calls from brother in laws )

[Dilitante1]

use a BAartPE bootable disk, and use chkdisk and the other HDD tools to see if it works after

[cjolley]

Well I was hoping for a more straight forward commercial solution and I found it!

I downloaded a trial copy of Acronis Disk Director. The trial version won't write to disk, but it will tell you what it finds.
It did not find the partition at first but it struck me that that spurious fat16 partition looked active and sat right over the place on the disk that the real partition table was.
So, I booted the XP install disk and deleted the fat16 partition using diskpart.
Then back to Disk Director, which found the right partition almost instantly.

Off to the store. DD cost $59 from Acronis, but $39 at Compusa.

Back home with the software and back up and running in 15 minutes.

PS It still strikes me as amazing that the original XP installer would change the partition table before the install is OKed.

[Claymonkey]

Glad to hear you found a fix. I'm surprised a Fat16 partition showed up as anything bigger than 2GB in size..... weird

[cjolley]

Glad to hear you found a fix. I'm surprised a Fat16 partition showed up as anything bigger than 2GB in size..... weird

It may be that the installer just tried to "help" me by changing the partition type without creating a new partition.
That might make the partition look strange to anything that tried to report on the contents.
I don't know