Temple of Ranma's Sailor Senshi Seifuku

There are also some excellent programmes to recover lost data.

Only thing I know of is to plug the drive into another computer with a working OS and the right cables. It might work as a secondary, rather than a boot drive. Good luck.
Wes

Yep. As a computer hardware tech, I have dealt with that sort of thing a number of times. As long as the drive spins and the control card isn't fried, you can recover about 99% of what's on the drive using readily available programs. An adapter to hook a 2.5" hard drive up to a desktop PC costs around $5 to $10 USD. That's needed because you have to be able to run the recovery program from within your operating system, and you don't want to disturb the drive by reloading the OS onto it.

However, one safe thing to do is an OS reload in repair mode. If you use Windows XP, you start the OS loading process and let it continue up to the point where it detects previous operating systems on the hard drive. Just before formatting, it'll ask you if you want to format the drive, or repair the existing installation. Choosing to repair will start the OS installation without formatting the drive, and Windows will install on top of the existing copy, trying to detect damaged system files. It won't erase installed programs or personal files.

That said, most repair installations fail to fix the problem. I normally end up reformatting the drive and installing a clean copy of the OS. But it's worth a try; all you lose is the time involved.

Remember, though, that this is assuming that your hard drive is fully functional and you just have a corruption of the OS.

Some time ago I had a stupidiest case I ever seen. One machine began crashing right after the booting.

While attaching its hard drive to a repair station (I should note we split all our hard drives into to two partitions: C:\ for the OS and D:\ for the user data) I found that Windows won't let me access the D:\ partition on that drive. The error messages were most incomprehensible, the disk checking tool just refused to work and even the disk manager just refused to open that partition's properties sheet. In short, it looked like that partition was history and needed to be re-formatted.

But I managed to figure out that it was a severe case of the NTFS permissions corruption. Something happened, and the D:\ root just lost all its permissions, as a result there was no one with the access to even list its contents! (usually, at least "SYSTEM" has it). So naturally Windows refused to work with it.

This stuff is solved via some shamanism with the ownership - there's a some workaround built into Windows itself. You must dig up the drive's advanced permissions menu (the "use simple file sharing" must be off, of course), find the ownership section... I forgot the exact details but if you dig around enough, it will ask you if you wand to change the ownership to yourself. After that is complete, the permissions controls become un-grayed and you can start adding users with rights to read and write that partition.

That said, most repair installations fail to fix the problem.

That's true. The most sensible thing is to attach your hard drive to another computer, back up all your data, and then re-format it.
That's an easiest way.

edit: WHAT WAS I THINKING?!
I had Skuld committing suicide! I still need her for later!
And I made Ranma a dope! I hate that I did what I'm trying to make different and get away from! Geez...
That scene is now obliterated, and now I start again... sorry.