My nephew had his first encounter with the infamous Blue Screen of Death which left his desktop computer utterly useless. Having been appointed the family “computer guy” many years ago, I received the casual, yet mildly panicked, inquiry, “Hey, can you fix Thomas’ computer? It says something about an unmountable boot thingy.”

What I did to fix the unmountable boot volume

The basic problem has been encountered by countless Windows users: A Blue Screen of Death that states somewhere in its total melt down of error information “Unmountable Boot Volume.” Fortunately in my nephew’s case the error didn’t turn his computer into a door stop. To fix the problem I had to boot the computer from a Windows XP CD in order to enter recovery mode. Then, I ran CHKDSK /p to repair the volume, ran FIXBOOT to rewrite the boot section, and rebooted the computer. Everything went off without a hitch and now my nephew is back in business.

Boot Windows XP CD, CHKDSK, and FIXBOOT in greater detail

My road to repair sounds easy, and for the most part it is; however, in an effort to be more complete, here is a more detailed description of each of the steps previously listed:

1. Insert your Windows XP CD into your CDROM and restart your computer.
2. Depending on the boot sequence defined in your computer’s BIOS, you may have to enter into the BIOS and set the CDROM as the first boot device.

Note: Normally, during the initial start up a message is displayed on the screen instructing you to press <DEL> or some other key to enter the BIOS. Depending on the speed of your computer, you may have to restart your computer several times to catch the message and hit the right key in time; however, when in doubt, refer to your computer’s documentation.

3. Once the Windows XP CD has completely booted you’ll be left with 3 options: install a new copy, repair an existing copy, and quit
4. Choose the repair option
5. The repair console will open and prompt you to select the Windows installation you want to repair. Normally this option is C:\WINDOWS.
6. Select installation you want to repair to continue which will ultimately leave you at a command prompt (normally C:\WINDOWS).
7. At the prompt enter CHKDSK /P to check for errors on your hard drive.
8. In the case of my nephew’s computer, CHKDSK cycled through the “performing additional checking or recovery…” process 3 times before it was finished. One of the last messages that CHKDSK wrote to my screen was “chkdsk found one or more errors on the volume”. Okay, that was good news… I think. Hopefully, it also repaired those problems.
9. Next, type FIXBOOT at the command prompt and press enter. You’ll get asked about whether you really want to write a new bootsector to the C: partition. Type “y” for yes.
10. FIXBOOT runs pretty fast, but it should leave 2 more messages on the screen: “FIXBOOT is writing a new boot sector”, and “the new bootsector was successfully written.”

After you’re done with each of these steps, it’s time for the moment of truth — remove the CD from the drive, reboot your machine, and hope for the best.

Try try again

If these steps don’t solve this problem, try it again just in case you missed something or by some other fluke the initial repairs didn’t take. If a second attempt still doesn’t solve the problem, it’s time to start thinking about a fresh install.

NOTE: This post was entered into the PureBlogging group writing project. If you want to join the project, check out the post at PureBlogging.com.

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Filed under: How-To & Tech Tips