SOLVED – XP Blue Screen Unmountable Boot Volume Cannot Be Fixed By CHKDSK
The computer was a Dell Dimension E510 with 1GB of RAM running Windows XP Media Center 2005, essentially what was a fairly top of the line computer four years ago.
It passed memory diagnostics, however, every single hard drive test run on it failed. The hard drive was a Samsung 160GB SATA 3.5 inch. Drive fitness test (DFT), seatools, and the test on the special hidden diagnostic partition all returned the same thing – just one error found, and it cannot be repaired, or it is unrepairable.
In addition, the computer would boot off of a Windows PE CD into the windows environment and allow us to browse the file system on the hard drive which appeared to be intact. This also was confirmation that the file tables were in good order.
Therefore the conclusion of the diagnostics regarding the inability to boot was that there was just one bad sector which happened to be in just the right place so as to make windows freak out while booting. In addition, a single bad sector is not considered to be an imminent sign of total drive failure much the same way a single dead pixel on an LCD screen does not suddenly make you think the whole display is going to suddenly die.
The resolution was to repair the bad sector with MHDD, a CD bootable generic hard drive test and repair utility. MHDD runs at a DOS command prompt level. Unlike other drive test utlities provided by manufacturers which do not work with other brands of hard drives, MHDD is not brand-specific at all and can repair a wide variety of hard drives which only have a limited number of bad sectors.
The repair is done through a process called remapping. Essentially every hard drive has some reserved, unused sectors available for this very reason. The bad sector is swapped out with one of the reserve sectors inside the firmware of the drive so when it reads or writes to that sector, it physically reads from or writes to the reserve area instead of the portion of the disk which has become unusable, hence the bad sector.
After MHDD performed the remapping of the bad sector, then CHKDSK was run to repair any file system inconsistencies, and bingo! the computer now boots again and without any apparent data loss at all.
On a side note, a standard tune-up was also very necessary. The computer mentioned above also was running three different anti-virus programs simeltaneously, in addition to palm pilot, iphone, and blackberry syncing software, a couple different memory resident printer drivers, and and some kind of always-running voice dictation software. Internet explorer cache sizes were set to a huge 1024MB, windows updates were not current, system restore was gobbling up 17GB of drive space, and all told there was a significant amount of file fragmentation too.
After resolving those issues as well, the computer was left running far better and much more reliable than it was when we had started working on it.
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