need some computer help

OK, so I know what's wrong with my computer but I can't access any of the partitions on my hard drive with a DOS boot disk to fix things. Trying to enter Windows safe mode or any other mode crashes my computer so I need to access c:\ from MS-DOS for Great Justice. I'm using XP and an XP boot disk btw. Help?

edit: oh yeah, and both partitions are NTFS, which apparently DOS cannot read

If you know what kind of HD you have, you could always try to find some tools that can fix it. If not, I think I may have a tool...*goes to Google*

Nothing :-/

I don't have any problems with the hard drive itself, I just need to replace a file that's on c:\ and everything will work fine. Mayhaps I can find a way to convert c:\ over to FAT32 and back? Is that safe? There isn't much free space left on that partition either.. but I suppose I could move some from elsewhere. So uh, is fdisk my best option? Although that isn't a tool I have any experience with..

My suggestion would be if you can salvage anything out of it, try to keep all of your hard drives + partitions FAT32, simply because NTFS is very unstable, and not much worth having as a file system.
This is why you shouldn't have any partitions, simply because it makes things harder. Do NOT convert over to FAT32 if you are already in NTFS, and for fdisk...use at your own risk.

OH YEAH! HAve you ever heard of the Windows Recovery Console? That would fix a lot of problems w/out booting into Windows.
Also, you could try just re-installing Windows, but just for everyone to know, if you ever have to make a decision about choosing FAT32 or NTFS, always go with FAT32. NTFS is the NT file system, and it is sorely network based. You do NOT want NTFS if you do anything else than run servers and network a whole lot.
If you need more information, I have a bunch of stuff I could send you that would otherwise fix the problem if the above methods do not work.

Ah well, can't run Windows Recovery Console as I don't have a Windows CD here (at home for winter break) and of course I can't reinstall windows. And heh I'm not going to format my hard drive over something so minor as having one corrupted file I need to replace. As for FAT32 being better than NTFS, I've generally heard otherwise, that NTFS's more stable and more efficient at disk management. Not to mention XP is an NT-based operating system so NTFS seems the better fit for it. What's your plan B?

a slightly expensive solution that *should* work would be to: go buy a new hard drive; set it as your cable-select/primary master disk.
install windowsXP onto that disk.
warning: make sure you are installing XP on the new disk.
once you have XP installed, you should be able to access the other disks as secondary partitions(if you have set the jumpers correctly.
this way you may be able to troubleshoot the other drive because you can access it.
at the very least, you should be able to retrieve your old data off of it.
or; there is a tool called R-studio. it retrieves data off NTFS partitions on bad disks.
lastly, NTFS is so much better/stable than FAT32 that it's not worth me even starting that conversation.
sorry, other than the Recovery disk or safe-mode, I don't have a better solution.

I agree with Opulent.
NTFS is *not* more stable than FAT32. I could give you reasons from little research.

heh, funny you mention buying an extra hard drive; I got a 120gb one for Christmas but am sorely deficient in IDE slots so was going to buy an ATA 33 card to make up the difference. I guess I'll email my brother to tell him to bring me back an XP CD when he comes home tomorrow and use that solution.. assuming R-studio doesn't do the trick. Although of course any other ideas are welcome.

Hooray, I fixed it! It took me a long time although it was actually a fairly easy problem. I eventually found a utility called NTFS DOS Professional which I used to access NTFS in DOS with read and write privileges. But the file I needed to overwrite on this system was 1.8M and when I tried zipping to get it on here pkunzip just crashed. So them I tried gzip, but with no more success. Apparently NTFS Dos Pro isn't perfect. But right before I was about to give up I remembered I have a ZIP drive so I just pulled out some drivers and tranferred the file quite without any problems :)

*thread closed*