Hi whocares.

The problem that I have is that I can not get direct access to the CD-ROM or DVD drives. What ever is wrong with my system does not allow me to. Even after using the WinXP setup disks the c: drive is not recognized.

I should have been clearer about what I meant by “26MB of disk space”. This was not a partition but how much space I had in my 40GB HD. The current NTFS partition is 39.74GB big, so even if I wanted to make another logical partition I just do not have the space.

03.25.04: I want to extend my most sincere gratitude for all your suggestions.

I suspect that what happened to my system is that Master Boot Record (MBR) got corrupted by some virus. This Microsoft link explains what MBR is in greater detail: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=http://support.microsoft.com:80/support/kb/articles/Q69/0/13.ASP&NoWebContent=1

I finally decided to overwrite the WinXP installation without formatting and check for viruses with avast!. My goal at this time was simply to gain access to data to copy and then reformat my HD.

I found a comment in another forum similar to this one where someone mentioned that when you remove a partition you do not really lose that data just the connection to it. One then can use data recovery tools you to retrieve the data. In my case, since I deleted the partition but not reformatted the HD, I recovered all my data, although all my applications no longer work.

Since this forum was so helpful in coming to my aid I feel obligated to give something back in return. I understand this is an anti-virus forum so apologize on advance for the following link. The link points to another forum that taks about how to reinstall WinXP cleanly and efficiently every time. I hope this may be of help to someone in the future.

The link: http://www.dvdrhelp.com/forum/archive/t200101.html

P.S.: I only read the very first entry, and I intent to follow its recommendation.

– NightWing