Will ZAR work after a failed XP install?

[brucern]

This is kind of a long story but I'll try to make it short as I can. I tried to extend a partition (NTFS) with Partition Magic that XP was installed on. I accidentally went over the amount of the partition boundary and when it was finished the drive letters had been swapped and XP wouldn't boot anymore. I thought I could load XP on a different part of the HD on a unpartitioned part. I tried this with the install disk and I partitioned a small part to put this install on which it did. I didn't go ahead with the install tho and backed out. Then I realized I could not access anything on the HD at all anymore as I could before. I then went in and deleted that small partition thinking that would fix it but it didn't. I since got XP installed ok on another large HD I had but now when I try to access the original HD with the other XP boot partition that was on it it says needs to be formatted. Can I fix the original XP boot sector so it can be recognized and will boot up again ok or is my only hope to recover anything off it reformat it?:confused:

[Alexey V. Gubin]

I think the "recover off / format" is the safest and qiuckest option. I do not think it is practical to attempt to reconstruct the boot sectors in place. Mostly due to this part - then went in and deleted that small partition thinking that would fix it but it didn't. This means something is damaged beyond the boot sectors, partitions are overlapping, or something like that.