how to recover c drive??

OK, here's the scoop. I left my computer on in the middle of the night. When I woke up my comp wouldn't respond. So, I hit the reset button. BUT, my computer kept on saying that it couldn't find windows. That is, I believe the error message is something along the lines of insert a system disk. Thus, I booted up with a win98 boot disk and saw that my c drive is fine. When I tried to boot up with my winxp cd it says that c drive isn't formatted.

Does anybody know how I can go abouts recovering my files?? Can I install a software so that I can read the c drive again so I can copy it to another drive?? thanks for any help you can provide..

Slave the drive onto another PC, then use a data recovery app to see if there is anything there. You cannot read and write to the same drive if you want any kind of recovery.

Is your drive NTFS or FAT32?

the drive is fat32.. can you please suggest a free data recovery app that I can use?? thanks.

here download this so called Ultimate Boot CD burn the iso image u download from there and just boot from it. there is enough tools in there that will help u copy/clone the drive or just recover of the drive right away to another drive