Chkdisk may be the thing to run.
You can do this from a floppy. Was the drive NTFS formatted or FAT formatted? FAT is much easier to access. If it was NTFS, look for a program called NTFS4DOS or ntfsinst.exe
Datapol makes it, but their main site has a broken link to the download.
Long time ago, I used this to run chkdisk on a friend's Windows XP Dell computer that was freezing during bootup even during safe mode.

Basically to my knowledge, freezes during bootup even safe mode.. only mean that files are missing or inaccessible... which are remedied by reinstalls and chkdisks.

And yea, I think its chkdsk, but it means check disk

If its FAT formatted, then we can just use a windows 98 boot floppy and owrk from there.