[Sussex] How to recover from a complete "balls up" ??

[John D.]

Well, I've managed to "do it" again!

I was sorting out my new partitioning scheme, and after bining all my 
linux partitions etc, making a new fat32 formatted partition for my 
mp3's, partition magic 8 decided to reboot the system 
(Aaaarrrrrggggghhhhh Nooooooooo! or words to that effect), before I'd 
managed to put the windows bootloader back.

So, after trying too see what I could do (if anything) with knoppix, 
booting my windows XP disc and trying the "fixmbr" trick in a rescue 
console, and trying to repair/replace the windows bootloader with a 
mandrake 9.1 DVD, I've had to re-install the mandrake so that I've got 
some sort of connection to the outside world.

The windows now starts too boot, but it then blue screens with a 
"missing autocheck programme" message and just reboots after about 5 
seconds.

Does anyone know how to get round that? i.e. repair the XP install 
without having to re-install it? So that I can get on with the task of 
doing the linux re-install (and no I haven't decided yet whether it's 
gonna be gentoo or knoppix hdd install for transition to "proper" 
debian)????

regards

John D.