Unmountable boot volume

[Jorge Regula]

Heyas,

I've been borrowing my girlfriend's laptop to work on while playing DAoC on main PC, but it's all gone wrong

I was doing some work on it, turned it off and picked it up to take it upstairs. When I got upstairs it started blue screening on boot. The only possible explanation I have is that I might have been holding it in one hand and the body of the laptop flexed (if that's possible, it's a tacky plastic thing).

It gets up to the XP "loading" screen where it has the moving bar underneath (before it's loaded properly, the bit that looks like DOS) and then blue screens saying there was an "unmountable_boot_volume" and resets itself quickly after that.

I googled for a solution and found out that you can use the XP cd's recovery console to fix it. I tried using the cd that came with my Evesham but I wasn't shown the "welcome screen" that the walkthroughs spoke of which it meant to open the recovery console if you press R. It would simply go straight to the screen asking me which partition I wanted to install XP on. I googled further and found that some cds don't have this capability so I got hold of a couple of other versions of XP but both were the same as before.

When I boot the versions of XP it recognises the disk but says that it's totally empty (C: Partition 1 [Unknown] - 38146 MB <38146 MB free>) and that there is 8mb unpartitioned space. If I choose to install Windows it says that it needs to format the drive because it is "either full, damaged, not formatted or formatted with an incompatible file system". I can't use boot disks because the pos doesn't have a floppy drive.

I've only had it for a couple of months and the HD is full of both her work and mine, along with photos of her family which are valuable to her.

I also told her not to bother renewing her warranty a few months back because "it probably won't fuck up", which means I'll be twice as buggered if/when she finds out

Can anyone help?

 

[Neffneff]

i wish i could come up with some magic cure, but it sounds to me like you are pretty fucked. i really feel for yer bud.

i hope your relationship is pretty strong ^^

 

[Gahn]

Soz m8, try these altho (seems to me that your hd is fucked tho mind ya):

http://www.dtidata.com/

http://www.vantagetech.com/

http://www.cbltech.co.uk/

 

[Yeke]

Might come in handy if the above fails
http://www.counsellingpsychologistlondon.com/relationshipissues.html

 

[Jorge Regula]

Balls

Do you think the HD will be fine after a format or is it likely to be irreperably damaged?

In damage limitation mode, already phoned flower company

 

[Svartmetall]

It gets up to the XP "loading" screen where it has the moving bar underneath (before it's loaded properly, the bit that looks like DOS) and then blue screens saying there was an "unmountable_boot_volume" and resets itself quickly after that.

OK, that message isn't good. It's not always caused by a dead HDD, but often can be.

I googled for a solution and found out that you can use the XP cd's recovery console to fix it. I tried using the cd that came with my Evesham but I wasn't shown the "welcome screen" that the walkthroughs spoke of which it meant to open the recovery console if you press R. It would simply go straight to the screen asking me which partition I wanted to install XP on. I googled further and found that some cds don't have this capability so I got hold of a couple of other versions of XP but both were the same as before.

Odd. Every XP disk should have the Repair utility on it - is this definitely a full XP disk, and not some Evesham-specific recovery disk?

When I boot the versions of XP it recognises the disk but says that it's totally empty (C: Partition 1 [Unknown] - 38146 MB <38146 MB free>) and that there is 8mb unpartitioned space. If I choose to install Windows it says that it needs to format the drive because it is "either full, damaged, not formatted or formatted with an incompatible file system". I can't use boot disks because the pos doesn't have a floppy drive.

Most laptops don't.
Ok, so you've got a 40GB HDD by the look of it; I would personally much rather manually format the drive using either a Win98SE disk or a boot CD - free download from www.bootdisk.com - in my opinion there's no substitute for running format c: /u /c from a DOS prompt if you want to sure of the state of a drive. If it says "trying to recover file allocation unit" during the format, or reports any bad sectors at the end of the process (it'll give you a little report on-screen when it finishes) then your HDD is, I'm afraid, fucked.
Be aware that running the format command will quite definitely wipe any data on there, but it's the only real way to be sure of the state of the drive.
It's saying "Unknown" because it can't recognise the file format being used on that partition, even though it can see the partition is there; normally the file format for an XP partition should show as NTFS. This doesn't necessarily mean the HDD is fucked, it just means the disk can't see a valid file format in it - the HDD can be physically OK even when the partition information is messed up.

the HD is full of both her work and mine, along with photos of her family which are valuable to her.

Eek. It's data-retrieval-firm time if you want to save any of that data. Unless, if you're very lucky and know a decent computer shop that you trust, you may be able to take the HDD out of the laptop and fit into a PC with a working XP install - on some (admittedly rare) occasions, it's just Windows that is messed up (the U.B.V. error message you got can be caused by XP's write-caching being messed up, which makes the Windows install unbootable) and the data files themselves on the rest of the HDD are still retrievable. To be honest, though, since it's saying it can't recognise the file format system, I think it's unlikely you'll be able to do this.

Hope this helps.