My daughter called and said, "Dad, my computer won't boot. What do I do?" Now, you must understand I'm in California and my daughter is in Maine, on an island six miles out in the ocean. She does not have access to a repair facility or a knowledgeable person. She has access to me.

The system is a Dell E510 desktop. The system, pasted in from the order form:

Dimension E510 ,Intel Pentium 4 Processor 630 with HT Technology (3.0 GHz)
1GB DDR2 SDRAM at 400MHz
Dell USB Keyboard
19 in (19 in viewable) E193FP Flat Panel Display128MB ATI Hyper Memory PCI-Express X16 (DVI/VGA/TV out) Radeon X300 SE
160GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM)
No Floppy Drive Requested
Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, English

She bought it 4 years ago next month, so there is no warranty and no tech support without cost. At the time her sons were 5 and 6, and there was a husband less responsible than the boys. She cannot find the system disk which came with the system.

When she tries to boot, it is unable, and asks about safe mode, last working configuration...and then goes to a BSOD which says "Unmountable_Boot_Volumn..." When she goes to safe mode she gets the same BSOD.

She went to F12 and the Hard Drive Diagnostics. The first result was, "Drive 0 Maxtor 6L160MO--Fail, Return Code 7". She started the Partition Test, and did alright until she got to the Read Test and the Verify Test. There she received "Code 0F00:1A44 Message Block 32885449" and Uncorrectable data or read only media, or something like that.

Remember, I didn't see any of this. I talked on the phone and wrote.

She tried booting again, and went to Diagnostics by a much earlier route, hoping that they would be a different set of diagnostics. She received the same information, word for word.

I see three possibilities, in order of probability: the hard drive is fried, there is a serious bad sector, or the boot file is corrupted.

We need some help on this. Any takers?