SOLVED – XP Blue Screen Unmountable Boot Volume Cannot Be Fixed By CHKDSK
Recently I had a customer bring in a computer which would only produce the infamous blue screen of death (or BSOD) when trying to boot no matter which boot option was chosen – normal mode, last known good configuration, or safe mode.
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.
Real computer service example – Dead and used laptops
BACKGROUND: Recently one of our Milwaukee area customers brought in a ~5 year old IBM Thinkpad laptop which had already been in and out of the Geek Squad with no results except “too expensive to repair” and “you should buy a new laptop” so this customer paid them a diagnostic fee for nothing and did not even receive any useful information. So when they brought the laptop to us, we started out with a FREE checkup and FREE expediting, with no obligation on the part of our customer to purchase anything at all.
PROBLEM: The problem with the laptop itself was video related and unique to this unit, that is, no other computers we have worked with have shown the exact same symptoms. When you first turn it on, the video would come up just fine. However, as it ran longer – maybe sooner, maybe later – the video would start freaking out something like old TV’s falling out of horizontal sync, then progressing into garbled characters on the screen, and finally just locking up all together. This process could be accelerated significantly by just moving the unit around a little bit.
Experience dictates that the problem seemed to be heat and/or power related, however, one of the screen hinges was broken loose also, and therefore could also be a loose or stressed video cable. However, when we tried plugging in an external monitor, the same symptoms occurred on the external too, even with the built-in LCD turned off. Therefore, we officially diagnosed it as a bad motherboard, since the video hardware is integrated into and part of the motherboard. It turns out the Geek Squad was right on this one. We also did manage to get it to work well enough long enough that it passed basic memory and hard drive tests, and with the hard drive being okay we still had data, which our customer really needed. There were hundreds of documents and pictures and other important files.
RESOLUTION: Our customer wanted to buy a refurbished laptop from us, however we were all sold out at the time and unsure when we would get more in. We told him to wait a bit for the impending back to school specials and then buy a new unit from one of the big box stores or online discount retailers. While waiting, we held his broken laptop in our shop pending data transfer to the new one. About one week later, our customer brought in a used Dell Inspiron laptop which he had bought from a friend near Milwaukee and asked if it would be suitable for his needs, which it appeared to be at first glance. After running diagnostic tests on it, aside from having a slightly loose DC Jack and missing the grounding prong on the power cord, it passed basic hardware diagnostics and software-wise had genuine windows, an illegal (improperly licensed) copy of Microsoft Office 2007, was missing some device drivers, needed some windows updates, lacked anti-virus software, had some spyware on it, and had traces of user activity from the previous owner. Therefore, we removed the illegal Office installation and fixed the other software issues to bring the laptop into good working order, and then copied the customers’ data back onto it and advised him to be gentle on the power jack and consider getting a replacement power cable which included the grounding prong.
Computers For Sale- Milwaukee – $225 – IBM ThinkCentre SFF P4 3.2 Hyperthreading 1024MB DVDRW 250GB XP Pro
- Milwaukee – $160 – Dell Dimension 3000 Celeron 2.53Ghz 512MB CDRW 80GB XP Home
- Milwaukee – $150 – Dell Dimension 3000 P4 2.8Ghz 512MB CDROM 80GB XP Home
- Milwaukee – $225 – Dell Optiplex GX240 Intel P4 1.7Ghz 512MB 250GB CDRW XP Pro
- Milwaukee – $275 – IBM ThinkCentre SFF with 17″ LCD – P4 3.2Ghz with Hyperthreading 1024MB 40GB CDROM XP Pro