Unusual Windows behavior can be a great frustration sometimes. Windows XP users face this quite reluctantly and repeatedly. Most of the errors occur at start up and render the system unbootable. Sometimes the volume corruption or the hard drive corruption may lead to several errors on your screen. One day when you prepare your mind to install some Windows updates on your computer, you may face several difficulties while doing so. The most probable cause for this might be that there are no files present in the Windows/INF directory. In this situation, the PC may still be able to boot but updating the system will not be feasible. You may get the same error when you try to copy some system files while running Windows recovery console to fix a STOP error. In all such scenarios, you may lose your valuable hard drive data which may require you to go for hard drive recovery through a reliable third party utility.

For instance, when you start the recovery console using a Windows XP installation disc and run 'dir' command, you may come across the following error message:

"An Error occurred during directory enumeration"

Cause:

The error may be caused by the following reasons-

• 
  The Windows/INF directory is empty. If the INF files are missing, then installing updates on your system will not be possible.
  
• 
  The hard drive may be corrupt.
  

The Windows XP will not be able to read from the hard drive, if the hard drive is corrupt and you may lose all your precious data stored therein. Here you can use a backup to perform hard drive data recovery. If the backup is missing, you should follow the below mentioned resolution steps.

Resolution:

Try the steps mentioned below in order to perform Windows recovery-

• 
  Boot your system through Windows XP installation disk.
  
• 
  Press 'R' to enter Windows recovery console.
  
• 
  Select a particular Windows installation that you wish to load.
  
• 
  If prompted, give the administrator password.
  
• 
  At 'C:\Windows>' command line, type 'chkdsk /p /r' to run the chkdsk utility.
  
• 
  After the chkdsk program completes, type 'Exit' to reboot the system.
  

If the above resolution fails to solve the problem, you should free download data recovery software of a competent data recovery solutions provider. These software will help to scan the corrupt hard drive and show the preview of all recoverable files in your system. They employ powerful scanning mechanisms to ensure an accurate and risk-free recovery of the hard drive data.

Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery is an advanced utility that recovers lost, deleted, or formatted files, documents, emails, pictures, videos etc. form corrupt FAT, NTFS, and exFAT file system-based partitions. It can run on all the latest Windows operating systems, such as Windows 7, Vista, Server 2003, XP etc.