Unmountable boot volume?

[Jikininki]

So the other day there was a random thunderstorm and my house lost power for about 5 minutes tops. I come upstairs and my computer (Dell 8400, i believe..purchased in late 2004) had turned off. I turn it back on and I get this error when windows tries to boot up:

Unmountable boot volume.

Can someone tell me what it is...and how I can fix it? Or is my computer fried and pretty much dead?

HELP!!

Thanks in advance!


p.s. and before you yell at me about getting a surge protector please spare me the lecture..if my computer is fixable (hopefully without too much damage to my files and such) consider it my lesson learned. I'll stop in Best Buy or something at some point this weekend and buy one.

 

[TC10284]

I wasn't planning to lecture you anyway when I read this. Those kind of things can happen with most any type of surge protector...well maybe besides a UPS with a good battery. But yes, it is still wise to get yourself a good surge protector or UPS.

Anyway, I would try to pull out the hard drive and stick it in another PC (don't let the other system try to boot from it, in other words, don't set it as the first hard drive to boot from in the BIOS). Then, see if the system will at first detect the drive. If it does, and shows the correct size of the drive, see if you can open the volume in Windows. If not (and it asks you to format the drive or something, do not format it yet), get yourself a recovery utility and see if you can do a format recovery which should ignore the MBR/MFT and sector flags that say data is not there. That method should go through each sector and attempt to recover any data it finds regardless of the MBR/MFT. There are other recovery methods that would most likely work just fine also assuming that the hard drive is not damaged from a power surge.

 

[Jikininki]

can you please explain that in english please? lol.

I'll see if i can get a friend to look at it for me....cause the person i'd normally ask (my brother) is too much of a selfish ass to help me out.

thanks tho!

 

[eplebnista]

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...atid=27&threadid=1874086&enterthread=y

 

[TC10284]

Originally posted by: Jikininki
can you please explain that in english please? lol.

I'll see if i can get a friend to look at it for me....cause the person i'd normally ask (my brother) is too much of a selfish ass to help me out.

thanks tho!

Heh...well I'd be happy to look at it but you probably live no where near my area of NC.

Maybe you should show my reply to your friend and hopefully he can guide you through some of it.

 

[KGB]

Try clearing the CMOS first.

 

[RelaxTheMind]

boot to xp cd go to recovery console "fixboot" "fixmbr" then run a "chkdsk /r"