[Clinging Bitterly]

I don't know much about WinXP, but the "operating system not found" error could mean just about any of the things others have said upthread.

I'll toss out a theory that your new software put a hook into your Master Boot Record for the purpose of detecting malicious changes, but maybe wasn't entirely compatible with your drive type and trashed it instead. Regardless of the virus type, a good anti-vurus program should have trapped low level disk writes, so I doubt your problem is from a real virus (all of the foregoing assumes, of course, that you are running some kind of an anti-virus package - but I dare say it's just plain dumb running any version of Outlook without it).

Personally, I'd scare up a boot floppy (make sure the write protect tab is enabled - not covering the slot) and start going through the nondestructive diagnostic tools that should be contained therein.

If the command line interface (formerly known as DOS) will list a C: drive directory then you might just have missing system files. SYS C: should fix that.

If DOS won't list a directory on the drive then FDISK /MBR will rewrite a standard master boot record without disturbing anything else.

You should run Scandisk with the report only (don't fix) option first. If it reports a very large number of lost clusters (thousands) in a large number of chains, then the root directory has probably been trashed. If you try to fix that with scandisk, it will give all your files and folders meaningless names and make the recovery chore very difficult indeed. Rather, you should go to someone who knows how to do sector level disk editing (I haven't had to edit a disk sector in a very long time, but I used to be pretty good at that sort of thing) and have them try to fix it.

Scandisk might also report mismatched File allocation tables. It's usually (but not guaranteed) safe to let scandisk fix that problem.

Beyond that, I don't know much about the more advanced WinXP recovery tools, but if they're like the ones included in other versions of Windows, I wouldn't expect much from them.

YMMV

Dave in Eugene

[TechJunkYard]

If DOS won't list a directory on the drive then FDISK /MBR will rewrite a standard master boot record without disturbing anything else.

Be careful with this. IIRC, Stage 1 of the NT Bootloader lives in the MBR, and it knows where Stage 2 is in the actual boot partition, it loads Stage 2 and Stage 2 then loads the rest of the OS. If you use a DOS-based FDISK to wipe the MBR, you'll pretty much guarantee that NT/XP partition will never boot again.