Nothing Left but boot record

[Legalegl]

hp pavilion 7905 with nt home on board. A friend installed a dvd -/+ rw on it and after being recognized the computer put up a blue screen of death. It was shut down and could not get back onto the operating system. Never got beyong ntloader missing..so the boot record appears intact. I was able to get to the recovery console via cd-rom..installed ntloader and ntdetect and rebooted..then hal.dll was missing. Back into recovery console and looked at c:..the only files on the hard drive were the ones that I installed...60 mb of files disappeared. The hard drive uses NTFS..is the fat( i dont know what else to call it)get attacked by a virus or what. Just like to know....thanks.

[Archer]

First off you cant access NTFS from a standard DOS boot disk so no you cant normally see the files at a dos prompt.
Secondly reinstall the OS to the same folder by booting with the windows CD and selecting the second repair option "repair a previous install" and this should fix up the system provided there are no hardware faults.
Doing so will require you to reinstall any patches not included on the Windows CD.

[Legalegl]

I used readntfs to see c: using a dos disk....worked fine...but I really ended up using repair console to satisfy my real need to no. Thanks for replying.