Yet Another Computer Problem...Help!

[Andrew D. Gable]

Yet another computer problem for me! I swear, I'm a frikkin' jinx or something. Anyway, it's giving me a Blue Scren of Death upon bootup (while it's in the middle of loading Windows XP). It won't start in Safe Mode, Last Settings, or any of the options it gives. On the Blue Screen it's telling me UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME. It also tells me about uninstalling any programs I've recently installed, but the problem is, I haven't installed any. It also suggests disabling BIOS settings like caching or shadowing, whatever that is. Any ideas what this error is?

 

[Krieg]

Option 1:
Sounds like your boot.ini file might be corrupted.

Try to boot off of your XP CD.

When you get to "Welcome to setup" hit "r".

This should bring you to a C: prompt. (This is known as the recovery console.)

Type: chkdsk /r [enter] (This will locate & repair any bad sectors.)

Then type: fixboot C: [enter] (This will write a new boot sector to the primary partition. Note: If you boot from a different partition than C: insert that partition letter instead.)

Type: exit [enter]

Your machine should now reboot into windows normally.

Option 2:
If the above does not work then go ahead and boot off of the XP CD, when you get to the install menu select "Repair the existing installation".

This will take a good bit longer than option 1.

 

[Andrew D. Gable]

As I'm pretty much computer illiterate, will that wipe the files on my hard drive? I don't want all my work and hard-earned cash spent on PDFs to be all for nought.

 

[Krieg]

It won't alter/destroy any data on your primary partition. Only your boot sector will be affected.

 

[jezter6]

I had the same problem.

If you have another PC, you can take the HD out of the broken one and put it in the good working one and run the checkdisks and scandisks. It took over 3 hours to run a good scandisk on mine, but it ended up fixing the problem. And while it's in the other PC, you make a quick backup of your files, just in case

 

[Rodrigo Istalindir]

Worst comes to worst, and none of the other suggestions work, you can always try SpinRite. Not cheap, but I've had a nearly 100% success rate with it over the years. If you really need the data, the $90 may not be such a big deal.

 

[Andrew D. Gable]

Just a follow-up letting you know what the problem was. Diagnostics and such revealed that my hard drive was physically damaged. Pain in the ass, once again no steady Net access for a few days, but, hey, I got a new hard drive out of the deal.

 

[Krieg]

Glad to hear that the problem has been taken care of.