Spontaneous Windows Failure???

[FearoftheNight]

On my parents' 3 year old emachine they had a Windows XP home installed stock. My uncle somehow managed to install Window XP Pro on it...only he didn't separate it into two partitions. The other day it had problems booting up. It will freeze up and stay at the Windows Selection Menu before going into a windows load screen and stay there for about 5 minutes until I would get a blue screen error with the message

"unmountable boot volume"

I used the recovery CDs to restore everything but even so it just freezes up at the windows load screen. Does anyone have any idea what could be causing this? I can't even be sure if it is software anymore.

 

[FearoftheNight]

anyone?

 

[spherrod]

You could try some of these suggestions

http://www.windowsreinstall.com/install/winxp/howto3/unmountable.htm

Personally, I'd do a full format of the disk and reinstall from scratch with XP Pro.

 

[imported_Ned Flanders]

'boot.ini' in order?

 

[spherrod]

Originally posted by: Ned Flanders
'boot.ini' in order?

good question - how many OS installations are listed at bootup?

 

[HermDogg]

fdisk /mbr

 

[Atheus]

Did you fully uninstall the XP pro? Or has it just overwritten the Home install?

With the recovery CDs you can run 'fixboot' and 'fixmbr' from the console. That should do it as long as there's nothing seriously broken with the install.

 

[FearoftheNight]

I'll take a look at fixmbr. THe idiot install of pro was somehow in the same partition. AT this point I alrdy tried a restore so it's only detecting xp home now. Does that make a diff at all?