Computer troubles!! I manually restarted and now it's ******Follow

o god... well i'm screwed now right?

i was on my new computer (my bf's old one, that he rebuilt and sent to me. it's a pentium 4) and was playing ffxi... the game was lagging horribly because of my internet connection. So i tried to log out, waited and waited wasn't working. I got pissed off and pressed control alt delete twice and waited some more.. still frozen.. so i manually pressed restart on the computer...
yea.. i've been told time and time again that it's bad for your PC.. but i didn't think it would mess up so bad ; ; what happens is.. it loads just past the logo screen "MSI" still with the black background. Then it stops and says something like "Disk read error occured. please press control alt delete to restart your system" i don't recall teh exact words... and so i would do that.. and it comes up with the same message, over and over again.. never ending... so i messed up my OS right? the "MSI" screen has two options, to go into dos mode, and something else.. but i duno what to do once i am in there... my new comp runs windows XP....cracked... yes that's right =\ i don't even have a disk... so am i royally screwed or could this be fixed somehow? my friend can lend me their xp disk.. would that work? am i going to loose everything on my computer? please.. any suggestions/help you can give me is greatly appriciated <3

Edited, Sat Oct 23 22:42:12 2004 by Domainee

Sounds like you slagged the boot sector of your drive. There are a few things you can do to at least try and salvage the data, but they are all relitivly advanced computing.

I find the easiest thing to do in that case is to download and make a linux Knoppix disk, put it in your cd drive, and boot up in linux. From there you should be able to extract all the files you need and then nuke the drive.

If that won't work for you, try putting the drive in another computer as a slave drive, and see if it detects. if you can get it to show up, you may be able to run a disk repair utility, either the system one, or you can buy a few decent ones.

It could be that you downloaded a windows xp update that disabed your installation since you were running a cracked copy. Your operating system is the heart of your computer. you were running a copy that someone screwed with. You don't know what they did to it. Was it sending your personal information (credit card, name, social security numbers, etc.) back to whoever cracked it? was it infecting your other applications? did whoever cracked it know what they were doing, or was it a hack and slash job that led to your current problem? who knows?

The bottom line is that if you are going to run a computer, you need a clean operating system. Don't wnat to pay for windows? fine, run linux or one of the others out there. If you run a cracked version of windows, you should basically assume it will eventually fail. if you are rpepared to accept that, then hey, great. but if you have data on there you need, you really need a good copy.