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Blue Screen of Death Options??
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Flake:
I got the blue screen of death on my mame PC last night.  The previous time I had used the pc the last thing I did was to run a disk clean-up and defrag because I thought the pc was running slowly through my front end (maximus arcade).  After the defrag I turned off the computer and last night was the first time I turned it back on and.......blue screen of death appears.

So I would like to explore my options of recovery.  I dont have a Windows XP boot CD.  The PC I purchased from E-bay and all it came with was a two disk set of what appears to be a version of Acronis True Image.  I dont have any experience with the software and for now am hesitant to go any farther for fear of wiping my HD clean.

My issue on the blue screen stated it was a "unmountable boot volume".  I found a fix online for this particular problem but they start with using the XP boot cd, which I dont have.

So if I go through the Acronis True Image prompts will I be OK?  Should I attempt to track down the windows boot CD rather than using the Acronis software?
severdhed:
the acronis software would be used to completely recover your PC back to the state it was in when you got it.  Often times when you get errors like that, it is due to physical problems with the hard drive.  Is it making any kind of whining or clicking sounds?  if you are worried about data loss, i would reccomend installing that hard drive in another computer as a second drive to backup your data.

you will need a windows xp CD if you want to try to fix this.

here is a link to a great article on how to recover from alot of windows xp startup problems, i have used this method many times and i have a pretty high success rate.  the only times it doesnt work is usually because of hard ware failure, or that the installation is so far gone that it needs reinstalled.

http://icrontic.com/articles/repair_windows_xp
Flake:
So is this XP boot CD the same as the install CD.....like say if I walked into a store and purchased a brand new copy of XP?
severdhed:
yes...the xp install CD is bootable.  it will allow you to boot up to the recovery console, or boot up into setup to do a repair install, or a clean install. 

i'd just be a little concerned about the status of your hard drive based on that error
Flake:
What if the xp install cd is a different one from the one that was used to install my copy of xp?  Is there going to be any license issues?  Or can I just use it to access the recovery console and be done with it from there?

Well the error I posted seems to be one of more common blue screen error messages and there are tons of links out there saying its an easy fix.  Hopefully they are right.  I dont have much experience removing/adding computer components.

One more question, I keep reading about the XP boot disks as being comprised of 6 floppy disks....WTF is that all about?  What if you dont have a floppy drive as most computers dont anymore?  How do you use them on a CD/DVD ROM only computer?
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