I am trying to fix an image of an XP pro SP3 drive which has been damaged by
overfilling. It is a 20GB image now residing on a 250GB drive. I have used
Win7 to check the contents of the drive, run chkdsk and defrag, but when I
put the drive into the original computer I get "error loading operating
system".

I'd like to run fixboot from the recovery console, but when I boot to an XP
setup CD it says Drive C is unformatted, damaged bla bla bla.

I've mentioned that the drive was readable as a slave on a Win7 box, so why
can't the XP setup system read it?

Does anyone have any ideas on how to make the drive bootable, without doing
a clean install?