Recovered my hard disk (winxp) after a crash.

No one wants to be in this situation. It was just getting worse day by day. I had given up at some point when I saw light at the end of the tunnel (TestDisk and an USB enclosure) . I wanted to share the same with the others so that it might help them if not now atleast later.

It all started after I ordered a 1GB RAM (PNY was on deal - I missed the deal too by few days). Never mind, I went ahead on ordered the 1GB RAM after going back and forth on buying a new laptop (than ugrading my current one). It was a Thursday afternoon and I was happy after I clicked "Confirm Order". The RAM was shipped on Thursday night and I thought it would make it to me by Saturday. It did not ... my first disappointment. Then came Sunday. I wanted to put back the screws that I had removed before. So I shutdown my laptop, cleaned the dust and put back the screws. Started it again and then came the blue screen. Oh cmon its windows and thats usual. Lets restart. Boom again blue screen and it rebooted and again blue screen. By now I realized that something has gone really bad. So F8'ed on reboot and tried all options ... Windows will boot till Mup.sys and show me a blue screen. Its a sunday evening , I dont have another laptop and I dont have recovery cd either. My only hope was an usb enclosure that I had bought few months back (in Microcenter at Troy, MI).
I took the enclosure and my hdd to office. Connected it to my desktop. Ran chkdsk on it. At my office all USBs are write protected by winxp. Hence I was able to run chkdsk in read only mode. It showed couple of errors and stopped. Bad luck. Checked with my colleagues for win xp recovery cd. Well mine was toshiba and my colleagues had dell. But I wanted to try. So asked them to bring whatever they had. Reached home disappointed. RAM had still not reached too. Waited for couple of days and then got a dell bootable cd .... Luckily my disk drive still detects cd . Went to recovery console, ran chkdsk /p /r . It detected the same errors, took couple of hours and fixed them. After that I ran dir c:\. I got a wierd error message "Directory enumeration error". That was a shocker. What happ to all my data. I dont have a reinstall cd. Toshiba will only send me a dvd for $25. oh ho... RAM just reached my home :-( ...
(to be continued)