Files in Partition are visible... then they're not

[davexnet]

Hello, I have a laptop that loops when it tries to load XP; it gets a blue screen error and immediately
reboots. The blue screen is visible for such a short time, it's impossible to read it.
The owner of the laptop tells me that the last thing that happened was that the device appeared to
be infected with a virus.

Removing the drive and attaching it to a working PC through a USB bridge show the main NTFS partition
to be a type of RAW, and Windows 7 asks if I want to format it. I loaded it up in Testdisk and
ran the analyse, quick search and deeper search.

The quick search show two partitons, the laptop recovery partition and the XP install partition.
The files can be viewed on the recovery partiton, but not on the XP partition.

The deeper search reveals another partition; it apparently finds the XP partition, the files can be viewed now.
I set it to type * and the recovery partition to type P, and updated the Partition table.

Problem is, once you attach the drive back to Windows 7 via the bridge, the XP is still "raw" and the files
cannot be seen. In fact reopening Testdisk, once again, the xp partition files cannot be read there either,
but I can go through the same exercise as before, the files become visible, update the PT but it never "sticks"

I have checked the XP boot sector using your program and it says they're identical and OK.
ANY idea what might be going on?
Thanks for any info.
PS I'm not an expert with you program, perhaps I missed something or misunderstood it's capabilities.