In numerous occasions, you may have found that your Windows XP system is unable to boot and hangs showing a black screen. Such instances may cause if some critical system file, responsible for booting, is missing or damaged. These problems generally occur due to different reasons like virus infections, corrupt partition tables, unplanned system shutdown, etc. If all of your corrective methods fail, then I would suggest advise you to employ a professional partition recovery software to recover Windows partition.

Consider a scenario in which you start your Windows XP system, which duly completes the POST (Power On Self Test), but hangs after that displaying an empty and black screen. No error message is displayed in this case.

Cause:
For the discussed case, the following causes could be responsible:
Some of the system files are missing or damaged. Because of this, these files do not load when the boot sequence of the system is selected during startup. These files are:
MBR (Master Boot Record)
NTLDR files
Boot sector
Partition tables
It could be possible that you are having a removable storage device in your computer when you start the computer. Because it may be possible that you have set the preferences in the BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) section to boot from the media.

Resolution:
You should perform the following options to restore normalcy in the booting process of your Windows XP system:
Resolve the boot components that do not load: You should restore the booting files to recover Windows partition using the following steps:
Restart the system in Safe Mode.
Check ‘Disk Management’ option to see if the partitions are alright.
Run an updated antivirus program.
Repair MBR in the Recovery Console using the ‘fixmbr’ command. If it is a FAT-based partition, then first use the ‘fixboot’ command.
Repair Windows installation: If you have the Windows XP Setup CD, then you should try to perform an parallel installation to repair the current Windows installation. However, you should ensure that you backup all the data properly.
Remove the removable media, if any: You should check if any removable media is not present in the respective disk drives.

If the system does not start even after using these techniques, then there is a need to look for other options. One such options is to use a third-party Windows partition recovery software. These tools are easy to use and perform partition recovery safely.

Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery is the best partition recovery software that rescues trapped data from FAT, exFAT, and NTFS file systems. Compatible with Windows 7, Vista, Server 2003, XP, and 2000, this software recovers partition from various storage media.