Unmountable Boot Volume

[fshanda]

Unmountable Boot Volume.

Thats the message on my partners Dell laptop. I cant get it to boot into safemode or the last known good configuration. It will only try to load XP Pro and then fail and give me a blue screen with this message and an error code. The hard drive also makes a weird repeating/access sound just before the blue screen. It does start to boot and I get the XP startup screen but thats it.

My guess is a fried hard drive or the MBR has become corrupted. Just wanted a second - third opinion before I went and replaced the drive.

[Mntsnow]

That is a possiblity. Is this a New Install or has XP been running on the laptop for awhile? If it's been running awhile and has had no changes to drivers and such then I would lean towards a hardware issue more.

[fshanda]

Its a 2 year old Dell factory install with nothing added for more than a year. He hardly even uses the thing. I just noticed it yesterday sitting there with the BSOD.

[fshanda]

I got it fixed today and didn't even spend any money. I had never tried a repair in a recovery console before and I had some good luck today. I ran fixmbr and fixboot(I think thats it) then chkdsk and exited. The laptop fired right back up. Running like a charm now :D

[NDC]

Glad to hear you got the system back up and running without having to spend cash... :)

[Centurion]

thanks for the post Fshanda - I got this last night on the old Acer -800 meg drive and I don't wan tto spend much either.

Is there a proggy to mark bad sectors and drop them from windows and dos.

I am doing some reading about utilities right now.

C