What the hell? No drive C!

[tyuun]

Alright my comp just shut down on me about 5 months ago and I tryed to fix it with no success so now I turn to you. Windows XP won't load at all it just keeps bringing up an error message something like "The computer was improperly shut down.... open in safe mode, open in regular mode..." OK. So I try opening it in all these modes and still it reboots and gives me the same black screen with this message. I haves loads of stuff on this computer I want, music I've made, pictures, videos, ect. I try hooking it up to another hard drive so I can at least get the data off of this drive but when I hook it up I can only access the D: drive (which used to be label recovery) but now, and I have no idea why, the D: drive is showing up as the C: drive and all the stuff on the original C: drive is missing. I can get into the menu through DOS but none of that stuff makes much sense to me. But still even if I open my computer in DOS what was originally the D: drive is now the C: drive and all the old C: drive stuff is gone! I have no idea what to do and I could really use somebody... anybody's help. People have told me to try using system restore but I can't get into windows to do that because all that information is missing. One night my computer was acting strange and froze so I turned it off using the power button (ya know you hold the button on the comp down and it will shut off) and when I turned it back on this black screen was there. Ok so now you know! Somebody please help me I know I'm not the only one with this problem.