Blue Screen of Death: Stop Error 0X000000ED

Hey there, Dell Inspiron 530 desktop XP Home computer is 1 1/2 yrs old For no reason this morning our PC showed a BSOD. It was booted up and up popped the blue screen. My mother is the primary user of this computer and she only uses it for checking email and for playing a few games, with occasional Googling. This is the first time a BSOD has shown up since it was new. The computer has been working fine up to this point, with the last time it was used being last night (11/30/09). STOP error codes shown: STOP 0X000000ED Unmountable Boot Volume 0X87113E30 0XC0000006 0X00000000 0X00000000 I called my mom from work to have her give me the above codes and while she was booting up the PC, a black screen appeared and stated that Windows experienced an error due to a recent hardware or software change. No hardware or software has been installed on it recently so that can't be the problem. I asked her to choose Last Known Good Configuration but when she did, the BSOD came up again. I'm wondering if I should start in SAFE MODE, but since there are no devices to uninstall, what would I do? I hope I will be able to fix this problem without having to reinstall XP. All help will be greatly appreciated! I am quite familiar with computer tech stuff so I'm pretty comfortable handling whatever help you can give me. Thanks! lucella31

Hi, sorry to hear about your mother's problem.

Take a look at this MS article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555302

I would suspect a corrupted file system. Does she have a Windows XP install CD? If not, read here and follow the directions. You may need to be "On site" though

You are going to have to get into BIOS Setup on your computer to set the CD/DVD drive as the first bootable device, so you can then boot your XP CD.

How you do this varies with each manufacturer. Normally you press F1, F2, F10 or Del when you see the manufacturers logo. Often there is a clue somewhere on the screen when you boot normally telling you what key to press.

If you don't have an XP CD, download and create a bootable CD from the .iso file XP Recovery Console

You don't burn the iso file itself to CD., you create a CD from the iso file using your CD burning software. There is a good freeware burner called ImgBurn which will
do this.

Boot the CD and at the first opportunity, enter R to start the Recovery Console.
Next, choose which XP installation you want to login to. Normally this will be 1.
Lastly you will be asked for the Administrator password. Just press the Enter key as the Administrator does not have a password (unless you gave it one, then you would enter it).
From the command prompt, enter: chkdsk c: /r
Allow it to complete undisturbed.

You're my hero! I entered Recovery Console and performed a CHKDSK like you said and though it seemed to take forever (over 2 hours), after it completed I restarted the computer and voila! The desktop came up and my mom was able to access her email this morning! By the way, you suspected it was a corrupt file system and I assume that's why you had my run CHKDSK. How did you determine this? Does an UNMOUNTABLE BOOT DRIVE automatically make a corrupt file system a possiblity? I would love to know for future reference. (I did check the MS KnowledgeBase link you sent, but it didn't really make sense to me. ) Thank you so much for your help! I will be sure to donate to this awesome site to help keep it going! All the techs on here are amazing! lucella31

Nothing that concrete I'm afraid, just years and years of working on computers. A corrupted file system is one of the possible causes for that kind of error, there are many others.

The MS article I attempted to point you to (and failed miserably) describes some of the possible causes:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555302 (I some how truncated the 302 at the end).

Does this also work with Windows 7? I received the same error code and it looks to be the same parameters and it has the UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME

With Windows 7, pressing F8 at boot time brings up the Advanced Boot Options menu (or should);

Try repairing the computer (first selection).

See here for info: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/681-startup-repair.html