chkdsk says, 'the volume appears to contain on or mor unrecoverable problems.' how do i fix this?

We would need a great deal more information on what Chkdsk reported in order to give you useful advice.

Are you running CHKDSK from within Windows? Try CHKDSK from the Recovery Console.
...and more info please

Ran chkdsk from recovery using xp boot disk. All it said was volume had one or more unrecoverable errors, and the volume available space in bytes.

It could be your harddrive is failing. At this point I would back up everything onto CDs, etc. A.S.A.P.

Then find the make of your harddrive, download the manufacturer's free harddrive diagnostic utility, and use not only the short tests like S.M.A.R.T. but the long ones as well.

Sometimes these utilities can correct errors, but not always.

sorry to ask but just to be sure and double check.... when you ran chkdsk from recovery console you entered and not just chkdsk, yes?

i typed chkdsk /p

chkdsk /p reports problems but does NOT try to fix problems. Use chkdsk /r. It may take a looong time to run (sometimes several hours). Wait at least 30+ means for a screen to change before thinking it might be hanging

After chkdsk /r ran, it says:
chkdsk has finished checcking volume.
72597732 kilobytes total space.
49999708 kilobytes are available.

4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
18149433 total units on disk.
12499927 allocation units available on disk.

and nothing else, but when trying to run bootcfg /add it still says says:

Error: Failed to successfully scan disks for Windows installations. Thiserror may be caused by a corrupt file system, which would prevent Bootcfg from successfully scanning. Use chkdsk to detect any disk errors.

Note: this operation must complete successfully in order for the /add or /rebuild commands to be utilized.

Please help!

OK. so i understand that chkdsk runs now and reports no errors, right?

And please tell me why you need to run bootcfg??? Can you currently boot into Windows? (and what version of windows are you using anyway?)

you might also see How to edit boot.ini in XP