During the day I work in tech support. Lately I’ve noticed a large volume of calls I receive are blue screens at boot
with either the BugCheck error INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE or UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME. After running diagnostic programs
to eliminate the disk being physically bad, I was wondering if there is any way to fix these errors short of using a
small debug script to erase the MBR and overwrite it with zeros. I’ve tried using the recovery console’s chkdsk /r,
fixboot, and fixmbr commands, but none of these do *anything* to alliviate the problem. Several times I’ve thought
of having customers go through each BOOT/SYSTEM service and selectivly disabling some, but that is just more work.
Either way it seems that somehow that some legitimate 3rd party boot driver is corrupting the disk stack, which
would be near impossible to troubleshoot over the phone, that some relativly minor setting is being modified, or that
there is some sort of a rootkit installed, in which case removal would be very complicated. Down to the point, do
any of NT deities on this email list have any tips or advice on how to restore the system to working order non-destructivly
and without requring a kernel debugger?
Asa