PC wouldn’t start. It gave a blue screen of death (BSOD) with the following error:

STOP 0x000000ED unmountable_boot_volume

I thought: this is not looking good.

I booted from a bartPE CD, but using windows explorer, it would just wait for 2 minutes before timing out

Using a command prompt and entering: “dir C:” returned nothing (no error, but no contents either)… very unusual.

I was starting to think the hard drive was totally corrupt.

Next, I tried chkdsk C: /F

It found and fixed a few errors… and after that, C: was visible again… And the PC booted relatively normally.

After that, I had some time to tune the PC… and it needed it, as it was very slow to start. Besides the usual need for a defragment, deleting temp files, and rubbish startup programs, the customer also had multiple antivirus and spyware applications, as well as some minor infections.

Once I was finished, the PC was running at a speed I was happy with.