XP startup error (blue screen)

[bullion416]

My buddy has a Sony VIO computer with Windows XP Home Edition on it. When he went to start it up today, he got a blue error screen which read:

Stop:c0000221 unknown Hard Error
\systemRoot\System32\ntdll.dll

What does this error mean and how can you fix it without reformatting? Thanks

 

[BDawg]

The first thing I would do is to boot up into recovery console (you did install the recovery console, right?). Then, I would attempt to fix the boot sector, the mbr, and run a scandisk and tell it to fix all errors.