I was on vacation last week so now that I'm back at work it is even busier than ever so I haven't had much time to think much less blog. While I was visiting family I naturely helped out with fixing and optimizing computers. My sister's computer was not working so I decided to take a look at it. The computer would not boot up and was giving the following blue screen error:

UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME

STOP: 0x000000ED (0x83BCC868,0xC0000006,0x00000000,0x00000000)

After reading various articles and MSDN reference material, I knew I needed to get to the recovery console but unfortunately we could not find the WinXP CD and all forms of Safe Mode gave the UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME error. Since I was on vacation I didn't have any CDs handy so I had to download XP from MSDN. To make matters worse, apparently the CD drive was also not working so I had to borrow a CD drive from an old computer. Finally I managed to get to the console and I tried the following command: chkdsk /r. After that the computer would boot but would still lock up (no blue screen though) frequently. So then I decided to try another chkdsk /r and again it took at least 20-30 minutes to complete and said that it corrected some things. Once more I saw a blue screen:

IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

STOP: 0x0000000A (0x0000014C,0x00000002,0x00000001,0x804F1BE2)

At this point I decided either the hardware or the disk was bad, so I wanted to recover the data as quickly as possible.

The first attempt was to place the disk in the aforementioned old computer but then I found out it was Win98 (not even 98SE) with FAT32 and it would not read the NTFS disk. I remembered the sysinternals free NTFS driver but since they have been acquired, it does not seem to be available any more. I did manage to find an old copy on the net but it did not seem to be very robust and would give me errors half way through copying the data. I decided that this was too painful and since the disk seemed to be working to try another option.

The second attempt started with a trip to the local computer store. I found an external IDE-to-USB hard drive case where I could place the disk in the case and then be able to access it via USB from a WinXP machine. Fortunately, this was successful and I copied the data from the disk. The only problem was that I was leaving so I didn't get a chance to find out if it really was the hard disk or the hardware that was causing the problem with her computer but at least I saved the data.