Recently, one of the computer in my office has failed to boot into Windows. When booting into Windows XP and to the point where you see a scrolling bar running horizontally, it gave me a blue screen of death with the following error.

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UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME

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STOP 0X000000ED (0X86FC6900, 0XC0000006, 0X00000000, 0X00000000)

Two Possible Causes

After Googling about “unmountable_boot_volume”, I found the article 297185 from Microsoft’s knowledge base. It mentioned about two possible cause of this error. One has to do with the IDE cable that connects the hard drive to the IDE controller where a 80-wire cable should be used instead of 40-wire. However, I have quickly disregarded this because the computer has been running fine with the same cable since day one and in fact, it is a SATA hard drive.

The Real Cause

The second possible cause mentioned in the article is a damaged file system. It said that if the second parameter (0xbbbbbbbb) of the Stop error is 0xC00000032, then the cause would be the file system is damaged. However, in my Stop error message, the second parameter is 0XC0000006, not the same as what is mentioned in the article. Nonetheless, I followed the instructions to perform a check disk using the recovery console from the installation disc. After running “chkdsk /r” in the recovery console, I rebooted the computer. Upon the first reboot, the loading into Windows took a bit longer than usual but it was successful. When I reboot for the second time, Windows ran check disk on its own during startup and it was booting fine too. Upon the third reboot, everything is back to normal again.

It is always good to perform check disk on each system periodically even when you don’t see any problems at this moment. To do that in Windows XP, you can simply right click on the drive in My Computer, then Properties. On the Tools tab, you will find the error-checking tool there.