'Unmountable Boot Volume'/BSOD!

[SideWinder]

Returned home last night to be informed our family computer - Dell Vostro 200 - has BSOD with the above message. It also mentions something about the BIOS not being installed. I know a little bit and my first thought was the BIOS battery running out? CMOS needing to be reset...? Don't know.

Either way, Dell offered a fee of £25 on the phone for a 'diagnostic' and i kindly declined saying i'd ask elsewhere first. I have a quote of £47 eek per hour for a local computer place but i'd rather try and fix it myself.

So what's up with it?

 

[PaulyD]

Unmountable boot volume obviously sounds like HDD issue, tried booting without them connected, will obviously get a message saying no drives detected or something similar but does it still BSOD? If you can get in the bios does it detect the drives ok there? How far does it get with booting?

 

[SideWinder]

Booting wises...loads up the XP screen with the green bar thingy and then has the blue screen. It doesn't make a difference if i change it to 'Safe Mode' as opposed to 'Start Normally'. I'll try and get into the BIOS now and take a look.

 

[SideWinder]

Okay, the BIOS recognises the Samsung HDD and the CD-ROM.

 

[~Divine~Wind~]

pop out the drive, slap it in your PC and run a few checks on it perhaps.
See if its a physical fault at least.

 

[SideWinder]

pop out the drive, slap it in your PC and run a few checks on it perhaps.
See if its a physical fault at least.

I'm on a laptop so no can do. I did a quick Google and people are chatting about Windows XP Recovery disc...might try that, if i can find the disc.

 

[~Divine~Wind~]

cant remember off the top of my head but that should allow you to do a disc scan/repair anyway.

Im guessing theres no files you need retreive befiore a restore?
just Ive seen some where they only allow you to do a destructive recovery rather than a non destructive option

 

[SideWinder]

Lots of files on the HDD.
I spoke to the local PC guy and he knew exactly what was needed...described it as 'losing its index' and 'damaged boot sector'.

 

[mollymoo]

can you not do a repair ?

 

[coupe69]

Have a search round the interweb for a BART PE disk, burn the iso to disk then boot up with it. Once it has loaded go to command prompt and type in chkdsk c:/f This will fix any errors that are encountered. Once the chkdsk has done reboot the machine and see if it boots, which hopefully it will, back up data that you require then buy new hard drive and reinstall windows. Alternatively if you have a copy of ghost or acronis then you could try ghosting the data to the new hard drive after running chkdsk. If this method doesn't work all is not lost. You can still try to get your data off the old drive by using A43 file manager, which is usually incorperated into most BART builds.