XP Unmountable Boot Record Problem...

Hi there.

I've looked around on the forum, and the problems described elsewhere are a little different to the issue I'm trying to solve.

My other half has a (secondhand) laptop, and yesterday it BSOD, and came up with the Unmountable Boot Record screen (for a nanosecond and then it reboots) if you leave it on, it will just keep trying to boot Windows XP Pro - it does come up with the windows loading screen and seems to get quite a way into loading before the BSOD flashes momentarily. To read the screen I had to use the Do Not Reboot option in the F8 troubleshooting options. It doesn't work using any of the other boot up modes (safe mode, etc) Her machine is an Advent 6412DVD laptop with 312mb (i think - it is 300 and something mb anyway) RAM and it's a PIII 1000mhz.

Now, I've put the XP disk in that was sent with the machine, and it doesn't let me get to the recovery console. It just says I'm trying to upgrade windows, and gives me options to do a clean install. I suspect the guy who sold her the machine has not sent her the disks he should have done.

As far as I can tell, the general advice is to chkdsk /r the drive, and 9 times out of 10 that solves the issue. Unfortunately I can't do that because I can't get the recovery console. I've tried various boot disk images that are around on t'internet but none of them have a chkdsk utility on them. More worrying for me (but I really don't understand this new NTFS malarky) if I use one of these disks, they don't show the C: drive - just the boot disk in the CD rom drive and the virtual a: they create.

Now, if this was Win 98 for example, I'd just create an msdos boot disk and do it from there, but evidently that doesn't work with XP.

I can't even connect her harddrive onto my machine and run chkdsk from my version of XP (it's a laptop HDD and has much smaller connectors). My version on XP is XP home anyway so I can't even use my XP disk to fire up the recovery console - it gives the same 'upgrade' options as her disk.

To confuse things further, my machine doesn't have a floppy drive, so I can't create a set of XP Pro floppy boot disks. Because it's a secondhand machine, there's no contact with which to get an XP Pro recovery disk (unless anyone can point me in the direction of an ISO of one?).

You might have to explain any solutions to me like I'm an idiot - MSDOS and FAT32 I'd be okay. This NTFS stuff seems like the Devil's work.

Help would be very much appreciated. My other half runs a Border Collie dog rescue, and there's a lot of important info about the dogs and fundraising issues on the machine she really needs. Usually I can sort these things out for her, but this has me stumped).

 

When you see the screen that says upgrade to Windows etc...pess F10 to install a new copy. This should continue to boot from CD, so you can get to Recovery Console and run chkdsk /r.

 

Thanks for that...

...for no apparent reason my intermittent floppy drive started working and I was able to write the six XP disks - and now after running chkdsk /r her machine seems to be working again.

I think I've learned a few lessons:

A) Buy a new floppy drive.
B) Never trust Windows.
C) (For the other half) Never trust secondhand laptop sellers.

Cheers!

 

I agree with all three, although to remain somewhat unbiased, trust no OS.