Have you tried using a boot disk? If your computer isn't looking at the proper drive to start the boot process from disk, then you need to catch the bios message and reset the bios so the device you want to boot from is the first place the computer looks. You can boot from the Windows OS Disk if you set it up this way, and you should be able to reinstall over the bad stuff. That's how I finally got into the kids' Dell after their hard drive died.

The other thing you could do is put in a new hard drive, install the operating system and software onto it, and connect the other drive, via an external case, as a slave, and you can see what data is there to be retrieved. You need to reset permissions in one place in order to access material on the old hard drive, because it won't let you in otherwise. I forget where it is, but you can do a search in the Windows database and find that information. It's a System thing.

SRS