31337

Ok, my friend's computer has XP on it and everytime you turn it on you see the XP boot screen and then it goes to this BSOD that says "Unmountable Boot Volume".

I checked at M$ and the BIOS settings are fine, and it's not a cable issue since it's a SATA drive. I can't boot to any disks, no matter what I change in the BIOS. I have his XP disk and the UBCD, niether will boot. His machine is a Dell, and thus has a utility partition you can boot to. That doesn't boot either.

I'm stumped guys, the CD drives are all connected and seem fine, same with the HDD, but nothing else will boot. And I don't have another SATA computer (or enclosure) to put this drive into, so I don't know what to do.

If you guys have any ideas, please help us out here.

Thanks

31337

Come on guys, there's some important files on this he needs. Isn't there anything that can be done?

se7en56

F10 during initial boot will boot to a CD

And if he needs to reformat, Shift + F11 (I think) will take him to the hidden Dell partition with a copy of windows so he can reformat, but this will delete everything.

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shiarua

This is most likely due to either a bad hard drive, or corrupt sectors on the hard drive.

Download DFT (Drive Fitness Test) and run it on your friends computer. It will let you know if there are any problems with the hard drive.

http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm#DFT

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Xfire

Iconoclast

Have you tried repairing XP? Throw in the XP disc and let it load up like you were installing it. You have two options now, sometimes (at least for me) the first one isn't available: try selecting install xp, you should get a warning like XP already detected or something similar and it should ask if you want to repair it. If that doesn't show up, go back (you might have to exit the XP install and reboot to start over) and at the install/recovery console menu select recovery console. This will send you to a dos prompt screen. It can be extremely confusing at first, so if you're a little hesitant to follow my directions, use the /help command and spend some time reading up what all the commands do. But really I figure all you need to do is enter the command "/fixmbr" - to fix the master boot record. I had to do this a few times when one of hard drives was dying in a quad drive raid 0 array, it was only a temporary fix though and it sounds like your buddy might be having the same problem with a dying hard drive.

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slngsht

first thing that needs to be done is to get the important stuff off the drive. Take the drive out, put it in another system with a functional operating system and pull the data to the working hard drive. Test the drive on that working system to make sure it checks out okay. If it's okay, wipe it and reinstall the OS.

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se7en56

Good idea. Yeah pull it out and plug it into another computer, pull your stuff then do whatever.

Nice slngsht

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slngsht

Thanks. Then if the drive is unreadable by the other computer report back. I've got some other ideas to get the data back if the partition table is gone whack.

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31337

I feel so stupid now. When I said I didn't have a computer to plug the SATA drive into I wa thinking about my boards at home. I completly forgot to chech HIS secondary computer to see if it was SATA. It was. I put the drive in there and ran the recovery console on the XP disc.

Turned out it was a corrupt boot sector. The fixboot command took care of it just fine.

Thanks anyway though!