thanks Dutch and pbman. I managed to fix my laptop last night - at first I tried booting from an external hard drive but for some reason I didn't have much luck. So then I went into the recovery console and typed 'chkdsk /p' which did a search through the drive and when that was done I typed 'fixboot' which seemed to fix the problem. XP booted normally and all of my work was fine so I quickly made some back ups. Just wish I hadn't waited so long to try a repair. Here are a couple of links which deal with the error: 'Unmountable Boot Volume'. https://www.techtips4u.com/kb/sw/SW00014.htm https://support.microsoft.com/kb/555302 sorry to hear that you are having some problems pbman. Hope you manage to sort it out.