Corrupted hard drive- NTFS signature corrupt/invalid...?

Well, I was trying to install some updates from Windowsupdate...I went away to do some stuff and came back to find that the PC had locked up. I hit the reset...and now it will not boot. The XP boot screen stays on...and doesn't get anywhere. I tried "last good" configuration, same thing. I tried safe mode- the page fills up with the normal text, but it never does boot. I tried the recovery console via the XP CD, but it won't get any farther than "Examining drive 0 on atapi 0" (or whatever) I tried reinstalling, same thing, it sticks on the examining the drive.

I took the drive out, and stuck it in my desktop (the one with the problem is a laptop). Well, the bios sees and adds the problematic hdd, but Windows will not boot if the hdd is there. If the bad hdd is "slave", I get a black screen after the XP boot screen. If the bad hdd is master, I don't even get a boot screen. (When the bad drive is in the laptop, it does get to the boot screen, but it stays there)

So..I tried using the maxtor software that came with a different hdd to copy the data on the bad drive to another seperate drive. Seemed to work great, an hour and a half later it finished copying and said something about an invalid NTFS signature, something about the drive not being formatted, and something about running NT disk administrator.

I really don't know what else to do. Is there some sort of DOS program that I can boot from a floppy that will read and hopefully repair whatever is wrong with the drive? The drive is NTFS, so I wasn't sure about DOS...

I'm also confused as to what is actually wrong with the drive? I read about damaged MBR, damaged partition tables...etc, but I'm really confused as to why I cannot even boot Windows when the drive is installed as a slave drive, but the Maxtor "Maxblast" software is almost able to copy the data on the bad drive onto another. (it fails at the very end)

Any advice and suggestions would be greatly appreciated- I failed to back up important data the way I should have, I hope it's not too late to recover the data...

The hard drive is a Toshiba 20GB 2.5 inch, formatted as NTFS, This desktop I'm using is running XP home (as was the laptop with the damaged drive)

Thanks in advance!

 

Wow, nobody?

Anyhow, I did get some sort of a NTFS DOS reader to start copying the files from the one drive to another...very slow, but better than nothing. I'd still much appreciate any other ideas, though...if anyone has any,

 

I have a similar problem trying to install a 120gig WD 7200. Error says invalid signature on NTFS partition, but Lifegaurd comes up with nothing. I'm also running on an ATA133 pci card.

Any answers yet?

Nycho