Recently I had a serious problem with my laptop. When I turned it on and Windows XP started to load, it suddenly displayed the Blue Screen of Death (BSD) and restarted itself. I tried to boot into Safe Mode (press and hold F8 until you see the menu)  but it stopped with a message: ‘press Escape to stop loading d346bus.sys’. When I pressed Escape, the laptop rebooted again. I tried other options on the menu (last known good configuration, safe mode with cmd and networking) with the same result. The BSD appeared only for a fraction of a second and after several attempts to read the message, I saw that Master_Boot_Volume was listed.

No new hardware or software was installed recently and I didn’t suspect a virus infection. d346bus.sys file is part of Daemon tools and I would have uninstalled the program if I had a way to load Windows XP.

I attempted to repair the Windows XP installation by using the XP CD, however no previous Windows installation was found, so there was nothing to repair. I was already thinking about formatting the hard drive as I thought I had lost everything…

The recovery console on the XP CD was my last chance. I tried to log on to C:\Windows, but without success. The command DIR to list contents of C:\ drive also produced an error.

Finally, I had only two options left: the FIXMBR command, to write a new master boot record on the hard drive and the CHKDSK command, which scans and fixes logical file system errors. I decided to try CHKDSK first, as that one looked more harmless. I typed CHKDSK in the command prompt, the scan completed, and voila, the problem was solved! I simply rebooted and Windows XP loaded as if nothing had happened.