Can anyone help me recover my main partition on my hard drive. We had a power outage as my computer was shutting down and will no longer boot to the original XP Partition.

The full error message is something like this:

STOP 0x000000ED UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME
*** STOP: 0x000000ED (0x81F6Be30,0xC000009C,0x00000000,0x00000000)

I am using a seagate Barracude 7200RPM 40 gig drive and all worked fine up until now. I installed another drive (identical) and reinstalled XP on that and I cannot get access to the original XP (NTFS) partition at all. The only way I can get into the drive (somewhat) is by using the recovery console from XPs CD. I've been working on this for hours now and the only advice I can find is to run chkdsk /r or chkdsk /f /r (neither of which gives any positive results), disable L2 Cache on the BIOS (still no luck and other partitions on the drive work fine anyways) or to load a patch on XP before this problem happens (nice, should have loaded SP2 sooner I guess).

So I have basically given up hope on using my original XP boot partition to boot from like it was able to 24 hours ago and keep all my settings. However I would love to be able to copy a lot of the downloads I have on that partition (my pics and MP3s are elsewhere!) to a different partition so I wouldn't have to spend weeks (33.6 net connection) downloading all the crap I have accumulated to make my PC mine.

Now, for claritys sake:
I have swapped cables, changed bios settings and tried the recovery console. I cannot boot into XP using the original setup, which worked fine up until a power outage, or any other setup. According to the information I have read I have come to the conclusion that critical data was in the HDDs cache and before it got written to the actual HDD the power went out. This is not a hardware problem in my eyes, though I may now have some bad sectors from the power outage. In any case help me save my data please... otherwise it's format time for a computer that's just had a fresh install of XP put on less then a month ago.
Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks
Rene

Check the utilities at Winternals ('spensive) and Sysinternals (freeware).

This works for Windows 2000 when it won't boot, and I assume will work for XP as well.

From the recovery console (accessed by booting from the XP CD), type these commands in succession:

------------------------------------------------------------------

Set allowRemovableMedia = True
Set NocopyPrompt = True
Fixboot c:
FixMbr
Chkdsk c:
Attrib -r c:\ntldr
Attrib -r c:\ntdetect.com
Copy d:\i386\ntldr c:\ntldr
Copy d:\i386\ntdetect.com c:\ntdetect.com
Attrib +r c:\ntldr
Attrib +r c:\ntdetect.com

------------------------------------------------------------------

If you are familiar with DOS, that's the equivalent of :

fdisk /mbr
sys c:

Crap... now I have a 10 gig partition that was originally NTFS and now shows up as FAT... with only 10 megs available and 2 files located on it. ntldr and ntdetect.com.

help....

THAT doesn't sound good ...

Yup... I think I am going to write her off today and start fresh. Now to find all those programs I had downloaded in the past.

*sigh*