Help! unmountable boot volume after defrag

gardnt1

Defragged dell dimension running xp last night and also cleanup on c. Pc was fine after, shutdown normal. Booted up today but have blue screen with unmountacble boot message.

have put in xp cd, and entered recovery, tried chkdsk/p and stuck on 39 per cent for 6 hours. tried /r and told me unrecoverable data....ran dell diagnostics, and hard drive cant read data apparently!! any way out rather than format? need data off drive......can i put in another pc as second drive? or is it lost?

thanks

Browntoa

If WinXP will not start, it may be due to a damaged boot sector or a missing or corrupt ntldr or ntdetect.com files. If there is a specific error message "NTLDR is missing", you need to replace the file. To replace, access the recovery console and enter:

1. Copy X:\i386\NTLDR C: (X is your CD ROM drive letter)
2. Copy X:\i386\NTDETECT.COM C:

with your XP disk in the drive

if that does not work then get yourself a linux boot disk like Knoppix

http://www.knoppix.org/

and boot with that and burn your data to disk

odowdchr

or if that's no good, use your CD to get into Recovery Console, then type fixboot c:

albertross_2

if the dell diags can't read it, it sounds like a physical problem, rather than logical (i.e. headcrash, disk on it's way out). You could download a drive fitness test program from the HD manufacturers website, to check for sure. If it is physical, a format won't help.

Make sure all leads are plugged into the HD properly. There is a program called spinrite, that can sometimes do it's best to recover your data, but it is about £50, so depends on how much the data is worth to you, and it might not work.

If you have another PC available, you may be able to attach it as a slave, for long enough to get your data off.
In future, consider buying Norton Ghost, and doing backups to DVD etc..

banger9365

sounds like you messed your motherboard and ide drivers up you will need to install the complet lot again (unmountable boot volume or somthing like it),
it can just show up out of no where (pc can run for weeks ,days,and months nothnig and one day it's there), windows xp with sp1 can fix it or you have to load your motherboard drivers before it start loading xp it will ask and you have to press F6 to load them it's in the first few blue screens of loading xp if i am right it been a long time since i had to do it ,
the error is basicly xp do not now to work your motherboard and ide chanels,
the error took me over a week to find out how to fix it first time it happened and a lot of IT poeple had not a clue how to fix it,including my wizkid little brother who is one of the top IT boffins for the NHS in my area because they all throuhgt it was a duff hdd

OR you can try this == You can boot to the XP cd and when you see the Welcome to setup press the letter R
You will get a dos prompt
Then type "chkdsk /p" without the quotes and hit enter
When that is done type "fixboot" and hit enter
"Y" and enter at the prompt
Then type "exit" and hit enter
The system will now reboot into Windows

If for some reason that don't work for you, you can boot to the recovery console like above and...
Type "chkdsk /r" then enter
When done type "exit" and hit enter.
This will take longer, but the system should boot back into Windows.

flang

I had this problem about a year ago i did get windows booting using the fixboot command and chkdsk command in xp recovery, however everytime the computer was restarted or left running for a long time the blue screen error of death was displayed again!
I gave up in the end and replaced the hard drive.