Please help invalid partition table??????

Question

my son has been messing on my computer and now when i turn it on it is saying invalid partition table!! what does this mean?? i would really like to avoid reformatting the computer as i have lots of videos of my children that i don't want to loose,please please help,thanks (i have got a dell inspiron 1520 notebook if this makes any difference)

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Answer 1

boot from your windows xp disk but instead of reinstalling select repair. then when the cmd appears(the big black screen) you need to type "fixmbr"( without the quotation marks) then when you boot up again it should work.