"Unmountable_boot_volume" response on Windows XP...can anyone help?

[Mosbonian]

All right Tech Geeks....my sons HP computer is running on Windos XP and has suddenly gotten locked....the error message we get is "unmountable_boot_volume"....unfortunately we can't seem to find the restore disk.

Any help so that I can get his computer up and running so that he leaves mine alone before he screws it up too.

mmaddog
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[DaFace]

You need to find a Windows XP boot disk of some sort. Doesn't have to be the one that came with the PC. Put the disk in and boot up with it in the drive (it should tell you to "press any key" to boot up to the disk.

Once you get to a screen that you can actually do something (it'll take a few minutes), select "R" to try and repair windows. This will take you to the recovery console. Once you finally get to a command prompt, type "chkdsk /r" without the quotes. It'll take a while (could be a few hours), but once it's done you'll be good as new 9 times out of 10.

[Mr. Laz]

need to get your hand on a XP disk


you can also go into the recovery console and use fixboot,fixMBR maybe

[Fish]

Simple check first... are there any disks in the floppy or CD drives or any USB or firewire drives connected? If so, remove them and see if it gives you the same error. Probably not the case, but just to make sure...

If it's telling you unmountable_boot_volume, then the restore disk might not do any good.

It sounds like the hard drive is not spinning up, or else it has become corrupt and cannot access the first few bits that tells the machine it is a bootable hard drive.

When you enter the BIOS (hitting either F1, Del, or F2 directly after turning on the machine), can you see the HD listed? If so, then the data is still on the drive, it just lost it's ability to boot. Running a repair on Windows should fix it.

If the HD isn't listed, then it isn't being recognized as a drive and it may be dead. If this is the case, recovering the data from the drive could be a real pain.

[Mosbonian]

Thanks guys....

I tried all of your ideas, but I am afraid the hard drive has crashed...

mmaddog
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