Saturday, March 3, 2018
Unmountable Boot Volume Dell Fix
Unmountable Boot Volume Dell Fix
So you�re using your Dell laptop (in this case a Dell Inspiron 1501 running Windows XP Professional) with no problems, turn it on one day and you get that gorgeous blue screen of death telling you that you�ve an unmountable boot volume. You call Dell support and they take you through diagnostic tests, get you to boot in safe mode (which won�t work by the way) and then they tell you to launch the recovery console or reinstall Windows.
Reinstall? No sirree!
Getting around this problem today (see previous post) here�s what I did (not my laptop as the MacBook Pro doesn�t throw up those kind of errors)�
- With the laptop on the blue screen, grab your Windows XP CD (might be branded as a Dell Reinstallation CD), pop it into the CD drive and reboot the laptop.
- When prompted, press any key to boot from CD, allowing a minute or so for drivers to load in the background.
- From the first menu you see, press �R� to launch the recovery console. This will launch a dos-prompt driven recovery console allowing some basic disk commands.
- Enter your first command: �chkdsk /r� (give about 20-30 minutes to run).
- When completed, follow up with �chkdsk /p� (give about 2 minutes to run).
- Finally, follow up with �fixboot c:�. This will quickly test the boot sector and prompt you to write a new one. It is likely that the boot sector on your drive has become corrupt, once you agree to write a new bootsector, allow a half minute or so for the task to run until prompted with a success message.
- Type �EXIT� to quit the recovery console and restart the laptop.
That� should be that. It helps to have the original Dell XP disc though. A standalone version wouldn�t display the recovery console menu on launch but the Dell OEM version does (purple coloured CD including Service Pack 1a � it�s been a while). Of course, if the disc doesn�t boot when you restart the computer it may be possible that you�re BIOS is looking to the hard drive before the CD. In that case you�ll need to enter the Dell BIOS (pressing F2 for setup on immediate restart). See here (Dell support) for specific details.
sourced http://kenmc.com
Related Post
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.