Even the most common Boston computer repair problem requires a bit of magic administered by one of our technicians.

Last month, a customer brought in an IBM Thinkpad due to an ‘unmountable_boot_volume’ blue screen of death. He explained that he was shutting down his IBM Thinkpad and accidentally dropped it, albeit just about a foot, while the shutdown was in process.

We removed his hard drive and re-seated it to make sure it hadn’t loosened in the fall. Then we booted the laptop using a Windows XP Professional CD, done by hitting F12 during the boot-up process and choosing ‘CD’ as the primary boot device. The CD spins and asks the user to hit any key to confirm booting to the CD. After the Windows XP file setup, the system inquires whether the user wants to set up Windows XP, repair a Windows XP installation using the recovery console, or quit. We chose ‘R’ for repair.

At the recovery console, we typed ‘chkdsk /r’ to check the consistency and files of the hard drive and to repair any bad sectors. After this, in order to fix the ‘unmountable_boot_volume’ it is necessary to type FIXBOOT. When asked if the user is sure that he/she wants to overwrite the previous boot sector, we typed ‘Y’ and ‘ENTER’.

Problem solved!

For more Boston computer repair tips and tricks, stay tuned in to the Boston computer repair blog. For remote or onsite computer repair in over 20 states, visit A+ Mobile PC Doctors on the web at their Onsite Computer Repair Services site.