My son shut down his lap one night last week, and the next morning when he booted it up he got the BSOD, Unmountable Boot Volume, with an instantaneous reboot and black screen with the options to boot into Safe Mode, etc. The problem was that it would never boot into Safe Mode, Last Config, etc. at all...it would load the drivers and just sit there for a bit, then reboot and the BSOD would appear again...a vicious cycle. The stop code was 0x000000ED with a subset that had the first code change every time it came up, the second 0x0000006, and the last two 0x00000000.
Anyway...NOTHING I did could get it out of that. No Recovery disks were available, so I contacted HP for them (this lap is 3 years old, so I was very lucky!) I got them during the week. In the meantime, I had tried running HD diagnostics from BIOS and it indicated FAILURE #1-7. I assumed from that that the HD failed. I tried boot disks, HD diagnostic disks from Samsung (the mfr) and not a one of them would read from the CD/DVD drive. I would keep getting the BSOD and loop.
When the Recovery disks arrived, I tried those. Hope rose when the disk did run-though not like you would expect. Never got the chance to do a repair...it would give me a light blue screen only, with the message it was preparing the HD, then that would disappear, and the Recovery screen would come up, but nothing was there! No options, no menu, nothing.
FINALLY, after I'd downloaded yet more HD diagnostics (I was going to try that Seagate mentioned in an earlier post), I tried yet again with the Recovery disks. This time I finally was able to see progress...it gave me the a warning about losing all data during the recovery (no problemo, I don't care, just run, [bleep]!) and off it went, albeit very slowly. It hung, finally, at the Software Installation screen-"installing software, the computer may restart itself, do not shut off the computer." Didn't budge, and the HD light was out. I decided to NOT let it fry itself by leaving it on all night, so I shut it down. This morning, held my breath and booted it up. It took off from where I suppose it would have if it had rebooted itself. So far, so good...I've installed all XP updates and AV protection and I'm in the process of running a scan.
I'm still not sure what happened here, but I have a strong suspicion...when I took the cover off the hard drive to check it, get rid of any dust accumulation, etc., I noticed two things: The two screws that are supposed to hold it in place are missing from their holes. Combine that with a kid who doesn't know how to treat a laptop (the thing probably has a death wish) and I wouldn't be surprised if those two missing screws caused the whole thing. I don't know.
Oh...I do have ONE question. When I set up user accts, I didn't realize that I hadn't been using the System Administrator acct all this time, and so set a password for it. When I set up my son's limited acct, it told me I had to set up at least one Sys Admin acct before I could do that. Huh? I just did! Well I ended up setting a second Sys Admin for myself, not knowing the "real" Sys Admin was going to disappear from the start screen and only make itself available in Safe Mode. Now when I boot the computer, I get an error message from Windows LogIn about not being able to log it in (no password entered, natch) so how do I get that acct back so I can disable the password and get rid of that error message?