recover files on corupt hard drive

Recuva
1

Well I reaklly screwed the pouch this time. I had a Dell Dimention 8400 with windows xp sp3 on it. I was having problems with my virus scanner, and Mcafee ran a chkdsk saw errors and said I needed to clean those up. I used chkdsk /f /r

Nothing seemed to be happenning after 15 min I rebooted. You guessed it I must have corrupted some files I cannot boot to safe mode or reg windows.

1. How can I boot using recova?

2. get old files that are not corrupt??? ---

3. How would I know which files I needed to recova?

I have 2 dvd drives and usb ports on the back, NO FLOPPY.

2

Your quickest way may be to burn a linux livecd and use that to recover what files you can to a usb drive.

If you are unsure about how to do this here is a very recent quite good and easy to folllow write up on how to do this using Puppy Linux. Suggest you read it all through first.

http://help.artaro.eu/index.php/data-recovery/recover-files-from-hard-disk.html

3

As Hazelnut insinuated, it is not possible to use Recuva as a pre-boot program.