Have hit a brick wall with this one

[iamdusted]

Could do with your help lads

Ok, I was changing some video formats last night on my xp system and the machine crashed, so I turned it off and back on again.

I then got a blue screen before the windows logo that said ' STOP 0x00000ED UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME ', so I followed the instructions etc to clear it by turning off shadow and boot cache etc, then I tried to boot into safe mode. The machine just hung after loading all drivers.

I looked up on MS site and it told me to boot off the win xp cd and go into recovery. When I do this is brings up that it cant continue setup because some files are corrupted, most notably ftdisk.sys ?

I think I just need to get to a command prompt to run chkdsk to fix the file system but I am not too sure. I am beginning to think that all computers hate me and I have started drinking.

Anyone help me out of a hole ? Thanks

[saladbarkid]

Yeah you need to boot off that XP cd again. When it's done loading, push 'r' to run the boot repair. When it fully loads, type 'chkdsk /r /p' then after that's done type 'fixboot' then type 'fixmbr' then type 'exit'. I find that this technique has a 90% chance of working. I run it all the time for customers who have the same problem and it usaully works.

[iamdusted]

So do I press R when xp setup is copying the files because this is where the error messages come up.

[filipino]

if chkdsk does not work then you have problem with your hardrive IMO.

[iamdusted]

Maybe I am not explaining it well enough.
When I boot off the cd, it says ' please press a key to boot off cd '
so I hit a key and the blue windows setup screen comes up. It says press f6 to installl scsi driver etc, then it starts to copy files, it starts to copy drivers and stops at ftdisk.sys and says that it is corrupt and cant continue.

I havent even got to chkdsk yet. was wondering apart from booting off the cd, is there any way to get to this stage

[saladbarkid]

Ummm...I don't think so. Do you have a second cdrom in your pc? If so, try booting off the cd with that one.

[Fr4gm4n]

Try using the xp boot disks...6 floppies that can be downloaded?

Steve.