Help - Unmountable Boot Volume

[chef24]

Last night I defragged my main HDD using Win XP's defrag utility, computer was working fine after defrag.
I rebooted after defragging and am now getting a BSOD "Unmountable Boot Volume" error. Could my defrag somehow corrupted my boot.ini?

What are my options here, complete reinstall? I've tried booting into safe mode, no luck.

I am really unfamiliar with reinstalling operating systems, do I lose all my files on my HDD if I have to reinstall XP?

TIA

 

[dme92189]

Well, you should try a checkdisk (chkdsk), using a bootCD or your windows install disk. This will check the install for errors and usually correct the ones it find. Here is a good tutorial if you need it!
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555302

PM me if you need more help, I have gone through countless HDD problems.

 

[Bozo Galora]

the idea of anandtech forums is not to have people meet up here and then do private one on one help conferencing via PM
its about people trying to help posters IN THE OPEN so that ALL can learn from the process

prendo?

 

[Larcher]

using commands such as fixboot or in some rare cases fixmbr, in most cases fix this problem. This is done from the recovery console which is accessed by booting on to the windows XP disc and there is an option to boot into the recovery console from there. from there you would type things such as fixboot C: or what ever the drive letter of the non bootable drive is.