BIG problem: Windows does not display user list at logon

Ok having big problems at the moment, hopefully someone here will be able to help.

Prior to a few hours ago my system configuration was as follows:

2 Hard drives, one EIDE (disk1) and one SATA(disk0) - each on a separate controller.


On disk1 There were 2 partitions, one for data and one for a win2k installation. On disk0 there was one partition with windowsXP installed on it.

I never use the win2k installation and so today i edited the boot ini etc so that windowsXP auto booted with no bootloader etc, and that all worked fine. Next step was to load up partition magic 8 and delete the win2k partition, and resize the data partition to take advantage (leaving me with 1 partition per disk).

The problem happened when i rebooted for partition magic to apply the changes. It failed the operation, and then rebooted my machine. It got as far as the logon screen - where a list of users is normally displayed - but there is nothing there.

You can't do anything witht he PC from this point onwards - cntrl/alt/del to get to 'manual login' screen doesnt work, you cant shutdown/restart or anything. Safe mode doesnt work, nor does incremental startup. I tried looking at the drives in partition magic via the recovery disks and it tells me that my 'partitions were not properly dis-mounted', and referrs me to their website. All I can get from there is instruction to run chkdsk /f - which i cannot do directly as i cant get into windows (the XP recovery CD only has /p and /r (i think, no /f anyway). Anyway I managed to do this using NTFSDos, and it found and fixed a few errors on disk1 - i thought great its fixed but i rebooted and found the same issue. So i ran NTFSDos again and this time there were no errors to report. Since then I have tried every tool on hirens boot CD, aswell as all the recovery disk tools i could use without losing data. I can view the files on the partitions via various tools and if needbe i could extract the data and totally reformat, but this is a total last resort. The other thing to do would be to try a windows 'repair' function but I cannot do this as my windows installation is on the sata disk, and i dont have a floppy drive to load the drivers with ;/ So I am currently installing windows on another hard disk (only small, not practical for normal use) to try and fix the problem from there, hopefully it will help.


Anyone got any better ideas?

Thanks in advance, spud/pete