[CabezaEnFuego]

I have a friend who gets the BSoD whenever he tries to boot up his computer. The error he gets is "unmountable boot volume" and 0x000000ED (0x823D26A0, 0xC0000006, 0x00000000, 0x00000000). Is there any way to salvage his computer without formating?

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Unmountable Boot Volume can usually be salvaged by running CHKDSK at the Recovery Console.

Boot off an XP CD (Home or Pro, it doesn't matter), press R on the first screen, press 1 when/if prompted to log on, type any Administrator password if any is set. When you get to the Windows prompt, type "CHKDSK /P /R" and press Enter. Leave it alone to do its thing, when done type Exit and press Enter.

Usually this solves 99% of problems with this message, but it can also indicate a hard drive on the way out.

[Neil Jones]

Unmountable Boot Volume can usually be salvaged by running CHKDSK at the Recovery Console.

Boot off an XP CD (Home or Pro, it doesn't matter), press R on the first screen, press 1 when/if prompted to log on, type any Administrator password if any is set. When you get to the Windows prompt, type "CHKDSK /P /R" and press Enter. Leave it alone to do its thing, when done type Exit and press Enter.

Usually this solves 99% of problems with this message, but it can also indicate a hard drive on the way out.

[CabezaEnFuego]

well it's looking like its a bad hard drive, and it's a dell inspiron 6000 laptop, he thinks the warranty is up as well, so how does one go about resolving this problem?

[CabezaEnFuego]

ok, got the hard drive reformatted but it took hours and then it takes forever to boot up and regular processes take a while to execute. Are those signs of a failing hard drive or could it be something else, something cheaper to repair?

[Neil Jones]

According to Google, your laptop has (or had) a HDD 80Gb.
It doesn't take "hours" as such to format a drive unless it's really really big - even on a laptop, an 80Gb should format in well under an hour under normal circumstances.

Easy solution is just to replace the drive - you have symptoms of a dying drive, the clues are in it taking all day to format what is considered a very small drive by current standards.

[CabezaEnFuego]

thats what I thought too, [bleep] it only takes an hour to format my 250Gb