Fixing UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME on Windows XP

When booting Windows XP: if you have the blue screen of death and the error:

UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME

Do not despair. Grab yourself a linux live cd and run the ntfsfix command against the failing hard drive.

1) Insert the linux live cd into the pc that is failing to boot.
2) turn on the pc. Press f12 (maybe different on your computer) to change the boot media
3) select cd

linux will now boot. Perform the following steps:

1) open a terminal window and switch to the root user. This can be done by issuing a su - command.
2) identify your hard drive, this is likely to be hda for an ide hard drive or sda for a scsi drive. The drive will be located in /dev
3) You need to determine which partition on your hard drive windows has been installed on. There is likely more than one. Their will be partitions named named hda1....x or sda1....x in the /dev directory
4) run ntfsfix /dev/hda(x) or ntfsfix /dev/sda(x) depending on whether you have an ide or sda harddrive. x denotes the partition number with windows

reboot your machine