Laptop is a Dell, I have a Dell Reinstallation CD, Windows XP Professional including Service Pack 2. When I boot to recovery console, it asks for Administrator password, never used one on the laptop, tried multiple different ones with no luck. Downloaded ophcrack and tables, no admin password cracked.
Have my full install Windows XP Professional, boot to recovery, goes to C:>, type in fixboot says "FIXBOOT cannot find the system drive, or the drive specified is not valid."
bootcfg /scan "Error: Failed to succcessfully [NOTE three letter C in the word!!] scan disks for Windows installations. This error may be caused by a corrupt file system, which would prevent Bootcfg from successfully scanning. Use chkdsk to detect any disk errors."
chkdsk "The volume appears to contain one or more unrecoverable problems."
Help!!! I am about to tell my buddy to go buy another laptop and I will help him upgrade all of his old apps to latest. I have proven I did get a good backup of his data before the hard drive went wacko. Thoughts?