Ooh, scary stuff this afternoon. I was preparing to back up my OS x86 installation, and make a bootable version on another partition, but at some stage I must have repartitioned the whole hard drive. Which included the 75GB NTFS partition with Windows XP, and a heap of data on it.
I originally had thought it was the NTFS-3G (read/write FileSystem driver for Mac), but, alas, it wasn’t.
So, I spent the next few hours downloading repairers, trying in vain to undelete, before I happened across one CD ISO that did the trick - restored the partition information from a backup. I then had to repair the windows installation (fix the MBR and something else, FIXMBR and FIXBOOT), and everything is back to normal.
Man, I’m feeling a whole lot happier than I did a couple of hours ago…
Spoke too soon. Some applications will not load, and I’ve had to back up all of my files to do a reinstall. Probably the safest method.
I hope that none of my data files were corrupted. I hope that the damage was restricted to the C:\WINDOWS\ folder.
1 hour, 33 minutes after the fact.