When you see the blue screen and primitive, white, gnarled font, the first thought is , "oh god, my data." The second thought is, "when was the last time I did a backup?" The words on the screen stare back at you unforgiving: UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME. The blue screen and its Stop Errors is a most challenging foe, but do not fear, Weary Clicker. All may not be lost.

You reboot. You reboot again in Safe Mode. Last Known Good. You rinse and repeat. And still the blue screen and UNMOUNTABLE BOOT VOLUME. Then you start googling. Now you are here.

If your hard drive light is blinking and you can hear any hard drive activity at all, chances are good you can retrieve data off the drive. If you can boot into Windows at all, even if it is just to the initial splash screen for a second, chances are very good you can recover data.

We found a number of potential solutions, but this one worked for us:

1. Boot to a Windows CD (at least SP2 for Windows XP).
2. Wait until prompted to install Windows.
3. Choose R for Windows Recovery Console.
4. When you finally get to the c:> prompt, type "chkdsk /r" without the quotes, and with a space between "k" and "/".
5. Press Enter.

At this point you should see a "checking..." message and a percentage complete. Depending on the problem and the size of the drive, it could take several hours to complete this process. For us, it sat at 51% for several hours, then slowly climbed to 58%. The entire chkdsk process took 22 hours. Just let it run for as long as it needs to. You may hear some awful crunching and grinding sounds, and this is not uncommon.

After chkdsk completes, you will be presented with the results, including disk size, available space and block information. In our case, we had almost two gigs of bad drive space.

If your problem was just bad sectors on the disk, or a corrupt master boot record, the chkdsk process will flag those areas and allow you to boot. We would strongly recommend backing up your data once you get in.