"unmountable boot volume" upon starting windows

[Barfo]

I'm getting a BSOD with this message when I turn on the computer, just a little while after the windows loading screen, is there a way to know what's wrong with it? it would be nice to know before I reinstall everything and destroy my data, or perhaps the HD died altogehter...well, can anyone recommend me what to do or what tool would help?

 

[alzan]

If you've got a floppy drive on your laptop or a USB floppy, there is a program called MHDD (or HDD Regenerator) that is pretty good at revitalizing drives. There's also Spinrite.

Have you tried hitting F8 just after POST and trying to boot in Safe Mode or Last Known Good Config?

alzan

 

[Severian]

"unmountable boot volume" is also a common error when the boot sector gets corrupted. I've fixed this several times before on various machines by booting into the recovery console off the WinXP CD, then type "chkdsk /f" without the quotes. It takes quite a while, depending on the size of the hard drive, but it usually works if the drive itself is ok.

good luck

 

[Barfo]

Originally posted by: alzan
If you've got a floppy drive on your laptop or a USB floppy, there is a program called MHDD (or HDD Regenerator) that is pretty good at revitalizing drives. There's also Spinrite.

Have you tried hitting F8 just after POST and trying to boot in Safe Mode or Last Known Good Config?

alzan

No floppy drive in my laptop, I'll see if I can run those programs from a cd, and safe mode yields the same result.

Originally posted by: Severian
"unmountable boot volume" is also a common error when the boot sector gets corrupted. I've fixed this several times before on various machines by booting into the recovery console off the WinXP CD, then type "chkdsk /f" without the quotes. It takes quite a while, depending on the size of the hard drive, but it usually works if the drive itself is ok.

good luck

Thanks, I'll try that tomorrow

 

[Laputa]

Could be a bad board on the drive, bad read head (which I'm suspecting the most; very difficult to swap and make it safe), a jammed motor, or bad sectors, or lots of other possibilities. If your data is not critical, I would recommend replacing the drive. Otherwise, it's going to be $x3 or $4 figure for the data. Hopefully your drive is not encrypted if you need the data. If it is encrypted, consider it doom if there are bad sectors.

 

[Barfo]

Originally posted by: Laputa
Could be a bad board on the drive, bad read head (which I'm suspecting the most; very difficult to swap and make it safe), a jammed motor, or bad sectors, or lots of other possibilities. If your data is not critical, I would recommend replacing the drive. Otherwise, it's going to be $x3 or $4 figure for the data. Hopefully your drive is not encrypted if you need the data. If it is encrypted, consider it doom if there are bad sectors.

Yah thanks dude, the recovery console fixed it, and the data wasn't very important anyway.