What Dave!! said basically. I've fixed so many XP installations with a Repair Installation.
In this case he might not have another PC to stick the drive into meaning that option wouldn't be possible.
>Chkdsk is also unlikely to turn a none-booting Windows installation into a booting installation. It may fix a bad sector, but it won't recover the file which was sitting there.
You've heard of journallng?
Right, I'd better actually try to fix this instead of just pretending it doesn't exist...
I might/should be able to get hold of an XP CD and boot from that. I /think/ that both my borked install and the disc are XP Home but if they're not, what will happen? Will an XP Home disc repair an installed XP Pro?
>I'm currently at about 1GB free so space will need to be made no matter what, just wondering how much I should budget for.
I'm thinking you might be borked right there, and you may as well salvage whatever data and do a clean reinstall. On a bigger disk. For xp pro I'd budget minimum 10G, and maybe 20-30G if you're putting all your apps, games etc on there as well.