Another Unmountable Boot Volume problem.. not like others you've seen!

[GuyHersh]

So the other night, I'm sitting on my computer downloading crap.. and it freezes up.. hmm.. oh well.. I restart my computer, and windows cant boot due to an error in C:\windows\system\system32 or whatever... great.. I've had the problem on a friends computer before.. gosta format...

So i take the HD out, and put it in my friends computer to back up stuff of it, and I start copying, then it gets a file is corrupt and cant be copied.. Then his computer froze and the computer restarted. It thus went to scandisk, and I went to skip it, but windows then wouldnt start. So I let it run scandisk the next time, and It deletes over half my stuff cuz its 'corrupt'! WTF.. great.. hard drive went bad...

So i got some drive recovery programs so I could get teh rest of the stuff i wanted (I couldnt explore the hard drive anymore with windows explorer).

Anyway, i get it all said and done. And i format it every which way possible, with WD Data Lifeguard tools and everything, but i never get passed the following error:

UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME... *sigh*

and the bi**h part, it comes right after I start the XP installation, right before i have the option to install windows or run recovery console. Greeat.. so I cant do anything..

I ran Memtest68 for like 20 minutes and it didn't find any errors, so then i just took out 2 sticks (out of the 3 I have) just in case.

Still the same error, I cannot get passed it!! I've tried with 3 Harddrives.. The one that got all corrupt (WD 120 gig SE), a WD 180 gig, and a older WD 20 gig. All of em get the same error at the same point, and I formatted them on other computers in windows, in DOS, everything..

I've never had anything be a bi**h like this before.

If anyone can help it would be nice!!!!

My specs are as follows:

Shuttle MN31N (mATX)
Athlon2800+ 333fsb,
All those hard drives I tried,
Radeon 9800pro,
3x256 kingston hyper-x PC3000 (also tried a friends stick of corsair),
and I guess thats all the specs you really need.

I checked my temps and my voltage lines and everythings like normal.

I'm stumped....


Guy

Edit: Oh yah, I also tried running Chkdsk and fixboot and they would go fine free without finding errors.
I just took the 20 gig out of a WORKING computer with XP on it, i just copied all the stuff off it and put it on a 10 gig for that computer..

 

[AKA]

Well its obviously not a hard drive problem. hehe


Have you reset BIOS to defaults and tried again?
Swapped out hard drive IDE cable?


Probably need to start swapping out parts in computer.
Start with video card first, cpu then powersupply.

Install with only base hardware. Disconnet any sound cards, add on cards, extra cdrom drives, external devices such as printer, scanner etc.


I've had same problem caused by faulty cpu & motherboard before.

 

[GuyHersh]

I went to shuttles website, and the latest BIOS update includes this fix:

2.Promoted "IDE DMA transfer access" function.

Would that have anything to do with it?

Guy