Help, laptop won't boot up!

Hi all! I need your help. I have a Toshiba laptop, probably 3 years old(work laptop) running windows xp. It's never given me any problems, even today I was using it. Shut it down about 4, tried to turn it back on at 8 and it won't boot up. It starts to boot up normally, gets as far as a screen talking about apologizing for the inconvenience, blah blah blah, and gives me options how to boot it up. But no matter what I pick, it won't boot up. It goes to the windows screen for about 5 seconds, and for an instant a blue screen flashes(less than a second) with something written on it, and it restarts again. I have watched it a dozen times, trying to make out some of what it says, and I think part of it says "if you've seen this" and maybe the word "detected" and something in all caps like three words connects with _ in between then and "BOOT" is in the middle.

Does anyone have any idea what is causing this? Bad power supply maybe? If it's something I can fix, before I go back to work on Monday, it would help keep me out of hot water. Thanks in advance!

 

Not sure if this is relevant but I wanted to add that when my laptop is booting up, the fans does kick on briefly as well as the hard drive.

 

At this point, I'm almost sure it says UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME. THis mean anything?

 

sounds like the OS got corrupted somehow. boot device is your HDD, and it is not recognizing it as bootable.
is it a work or personal computer?

 

It's a work laptop, and I'd love to fix it myself. it is running windows XP Pro, but I read on another board tonight, any windows XP disc pro or not, will fix it. Any truth to this? I think I can hunt down my XP disc.

 

you could try with xp cd. question is though, does your laptop, in the boot faze, go to cdrom first then HDD? if you can get into the bios, check it out and set it up if it is not like that.

 

I can hit f2 and it goes to a menu that has HDD and CDROM, I think.

 

yea, if it says f2 for boot menu. set it for cdrom first then hdd second

 

Ok, next question. I don't have an XP Pro cd. I have an XP home CD. Will that work? Any harm to try?

 

pro is the avanced version of home.. you could test it. just don't reformat

 

Just do the repair when it gives me the option, right? It brings up an "r"?

 

yes, try the repair. xp home should have all general tools/drivers/software to fix it.....then again, I did say SHOULD and we are dsealing with Microsoft.

 

Fair enough! I have a friend who may have XP Pro. I may wait and text him in the am, to see if he does, and if so I'll try it first. Thanks so much for the help!

 

you're welcome. post back if you have more problems.:cool

 

Well I got a copy of XP Pro and I am working on doing the repair now.

 

Victory screech!!!! Thanks so much for the help!