Customer has a laptop that no longer starts.

Before I saw it, I thought it would be another corrupt registry problem.

when I got to the laptop, I could see it was partly starting xp, and then would blue screen of death, with the error: “unmountable_boot_volume”.

So I decide to boot from bartPE, but I found I couldn’t do a fixboot command. Customer didn’t have the original XP installation CD, so I had to take it back to the office.

I then removed the HDD, connected it to the office PC, and backed up all the important data.

While that was happening, I did some research, and I found that a chkdsk /f , followed by a fixboot should fix the problem.

So I do the chkdsk /f e: (it took a while), but the fixboot e: command returned: fixboot is not recognized as an internal or external command … etc

OK, it looks like I’ll need to boot to the recovery console to complete this.

So I plug the HDD back into the laptop, start it (expecting to see the BSOD), and the PC boots normally 🙂

OK looks like I don’t need to do the fixboot after all. Cool!