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.
SOLVED – Windows cannot access the specified device, path or file in xp pro
I was just working on a windows xp professional computer for a client which was heavily infected with viruses, including the infamous virut virus. We successfully cleaned it out of hundreds of infections leaving several intricate software installations intact… only to have the machine come right back into our shop for warranty service.
Though every user account on the computer booted up fine, of the three accounts, just one of them did not allow any programs to run on it. When trying to run anything from the actual executable file, from a shortcut, or from start->run, it would just say “Windows cannot access the specified device, path or file” which also affected dll files and made it virtually impossible to do anything with it. For example, control panel would open but then none of the items in control panel could be opened, nor could control panel be closed. Meanwhile, the other user accounts worked fine – just this one was causing problems.
There was, however, a loophole in the madness. Applications could be run by opening files which were set to run in those applications. For example, open a word file, and microsoft word opens. Therefore, I opened an html file to get internet explorer to run. Once it was running I could check the internet options. There the problem became quickly obvious. In the internet explorer security settings, normally there are four zones – intranet, internet, trusted, and restriced. Now there was only one zone – the normally hidden “My Computer” zone – and it was set to restricted, high security only. It would not allow me to change it.
After doing further research which led bascially nowhere and also investigating the group policy on the local machine, which apparently contained no abnormalities related to this issue, I finally decided to give up on trying to fix the offending user account. The source of the problem was officially recorded as user registry corruption brought on by literally hundreds upon hundreds of prior, recent virus infections.
There was, nonetheless, in the end a simple fix: I simply logged in as administrator, created another user account, and copied over all the files from the defective user account into the new user account with the exception of the registry (ntuser.dat) file. So far it seems to be working great!
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