Can't boot XP, cross-linked realplayer file

[chazersize]

Hello, and THANKS for this forum.

I was in my supervisors office and when i went back to mine, my amd processor computer was rebooting and running a windows scan. I had left the machine running over the weekend and we apparently had a power failure, although nothing seemed wrong on boot up (I skipped the scan the first time - oops!)
It gets to 56% of the scan, then gives an error, something like:
documents and settings\My Name\Application Data\Real\RealPlayer\History\filename.lnk is cross-linked on allocation unit 19751.

The HD drive light stays on and it sounds like it's reading the hd, but nothing happens on the screen.
I had to shut down hard, then reboot. I tried booting in safe mode with command prompt but it does the same thing (won't finish booting) after trying to load System32\Drivers\Mup.sys.
Since i can't get to the file to delete it, I'm lost.
Thanks for your help.

[Paul Komski]

Safe Mode often sits at Mup.sys for quite a while before continuing but if there is significant file system corruption (as indicated by the appearance of cross-linked files) the freeze in safe mode could well be permanent. If there is important data to recover then I strongly suggest trying to recovery it before attempting any file system restoration by the use of chkdsk from the installation CD's Recovery Console. You could try a Knoppix Live CD to see if it can access and read the relevant data and then use the same CD to copy that data to a USB device or burn it to a CD. If Knoppix is no good then you could try GetDataBack with the drive slaved to another PC.

Once data safe (or if its recovery is immaterial) run chkdsk from the recovery console and if that fails to mend the file system you may need to do either a repair or parallel installation and probably a full reformat and clean re-installation. There is a finite danger that running chkdisk can make data recovery harder at the expense of getting a system going again and that is the reason for the warning about using it prematurely.