Last week a co-worker brought in his three month old Dell laptop with the dreaded blue screen of death. Upon booting, it showed an Unmountable_Boot_Volume error screen. After making sure that his RAM was seated properly and that there was no physical damage to the laptop, I prepared him for the worst, we may need to format the hard drive and reinstall Windows, possibly have Dell ship a new hard drive out to replace this one.

He wasn’t all that happy with me, but I told him I would see what I could find on the internet. A quick search proved that the Microsoft page for this problem was a joke and offered no real solution, but I did find Tech Tips 4 U, possibly one of the ugliest pages ever created with Front Page. In any event, they provided the simplest solution:

  1. Boot from a Windows XP CD
  2. Go into the recovery console
  3. Once the command line comes up type chkdsk /p
  4. When completed, type fixboot
  5. Hit the Y key and Enter key when prompted
  6. Type exit when finished
  7. Remove XP CD before reboot

This is the only time in the last seven plus years that the recovery console in any Windows operating system has ever worked for me! It took less then five minutes to do the recovery and verify no data was lost.

If you come across this problem, there is your solution, or wait for the fan boys to say how much better Mac or Linux is, heh.

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