So I get the nice blue screen on startup from my laptop after I dropped it yesterday and think my laptop has finally shit the bed from so much abuse. Looking at it closely, the error is 'unmountable boot volume'. Looking it up in past threads and microsoft support it tells me its a software problem, not hardware and so you can use the windows xp cd to do a restore. My problem is I never got the xp cd, it came installed on my laptop. It came with recovery cd's (4 of them) that only seem to help me when I need to reformat the entire hard drive, which if worst comes to worst I'll do. But right now I want to just restore it and get my files back. Am I missing something to the recovery cd's? It only has two options from what it shows, run diagnostics and reformat the hard drive. Checking diagnostics only tells me anything I seem to check passes i.e. ram, processor, load, etc are all fine. Its a Thinkpad R40 if it helps. None of my friends seem to have the cd with them. I'd pay someone 10 or 15 bucks to borrow their xp cd for an hour, or pay someone who isn't gonna rape me financially for doing it themselves.

[Edited on December 15, 2007 at 2:39 AM. Reason : garrrrrr, title should be discs not disks, my laptop has no floppy drive]

12/15/2007 2:38:58 AM

ha, I was about to ask if you had a floppy drive. Find a friend who has an XP pro or XP home cd and

Quote :

"Follow the steps below to correct these file system issues: 1) Start your computer with your Windows XP CD-ROM, or with Windows XP boot disks 2) When the Welcome to Setup screen appears, press R to Repair the installation using the Recovery Console 3) If you have a dual-boot or multiple-boot computer, select the Windows installation you want to access 4) Type the administrator password when you are prompted, if no administrator password is set then just press Enter 5) At the command prompt, type CHKDSK /R and then press Enter 6) Once CHKDSK has finished checking and repairing the hard drive, type EXIT and press Enter to restart your computer If this procedure does not work, repeat it and use the fixboot command in step 5 instead of the chkdsk /r command. FIXBOOT writes a new partition boot sector to the system partition. The fixboot command is only available when you are using the Recovery Console."

12/15/2007 10:10:25 AM

I have a XP cd you can borrow.

12/15/2007 10:18:56 AM

^^Yeah, saw that from microsoft support webpage when I looked up the error.

^PM Sent

12/15/2007 4:05:34 PM