Re: Unmountable_Boot_Volume
 

I seen that today. A guy bought a pc round with this problem and lo and behold it fired up straight away. Turned out he had his ipod plugged in all the time at home and thats when the problem started

Re: Unmountable_Boot_Volume
 

I haven't had a USB drive plugged in. Plus I only have 2 drives as bootable in my BIOS, 1. DVD Drive, 2. Hard Disc. To be honest, the only USB device that's ever plugged into the computer is a USB mouse.

When I swapped drives, I reinstalled Windows.

Re: Unmountable_Boot_Volume
 

How many boots did the system last before failing to boot? Seems very odd, Though I don't want to spread doom and gloom, given the evidence thus far the only component in common seems to be the Mobo.

You are basically at the point where if you need to be absolutely sure then remove all but 1 ram module, remove all non essential peripherals. If still not working reinstall/repair OS as may have been corrupted by something else. see how long you last

You simply need to start ruling out components till only 1 is left, it isn't a quick nor painless process but it is all you've got based upon the evidence thus far presented.

Re: Unmountable_Boot_Volume
 

The system seemed to work for about a week before it encountered problems.

I used to have a socket 754 motherboard with standard DDR memory slots...the same problems occurred.

I now have a socket AM2 motherboard with DDR2 memory slots, which obviously requires different memory to the last board. The problem still occurs.

I formatted the hard drives many times, on both setups, and still had problems.

I only have the motherboard, hard drive and fan attached. I only had the dvd-drive attached to install, then de-attached it.

I know it isn't the Windows XP install disc, because I used the exact same disc on my main computer, which is problem free, after about 6 months.

This means it's only the drives?

Re: Unmountable_Boot_Volume
 

Based upon the evidence I would have to agree that the issue looks (at this stage) to point to the fact that you may possibly be a very unlucky person indeed. Assuming that we are down to just the drives I would be tempted to connect them to a working machine either as secondary drives or through a USB caddy and then running chkdsk on them.

If this is clean it maybe possible that some software you use is causing all this grief. e.g. do you play with vmware or other virtualisation software?

Re: Unmountable_Boot_Volume
 

It might be an idea to get the diagnostic utility from the hard drive manufacturers website and run it - it could be your developing bad sectors on the drives and its just sods law for them to occur in the MBR on both drives.

Re: Unmountable_Boot_Volume
 

I have ran disc checks from a resource disc I have, and that found bad sectors on both drives. Though it said it had repaired all of the bad sectors.

I have used virtual machines before, but I have limited experience and knowledge in that area.

Re: Unmountable_Boot_Volume
 

I don't believe that you can 'repair' bad sectors. The terminology that the tools use is misleading you a bit. Modern drives replace bad sectors with a spare mapped in from a reserved area then block the bad one.

Unfortunately the pool of spare sectors is limited and once you run out of spares your drive is toast.

Personally I retire a drive as soon as it shows any bad sectors. In my experience it's usually the start of a downward spiral.

Re: Unmountable_Boot_Volume
 

SpinRite is always a good tool to have in your box of tricks, it has only saved me once but it was a big save so I would always recommend it.

Re: Unmountable_Boot_Volume
 

Seconded. It's an essential low-level tool although it takes forever to run on big modern drives.

:sleep:

Re: Unmountable_Boot_Volume
 

Given the low cost of a modern SATA drive vs the fear of losing your data I would personally replace the drive. In my experience your drive is telling you that it is sick.

cough...cough!

Re: Unmountable_Boot_Volume
 

Ummm it is booting straight into the partition screen and not from the OS Boot disc?
If so Might be worth checking that the BIOS settings are set to boot from CD, otherwise your system will try and boot from the hard drive partition

Re: Unmountable_Boot_Volume
 

I could boot from the CD, just when I did boot from the XP install disc, it would skip the whole 'welcome screen' and go into the partition selection. Meaning I couldn't access the repair function.

I have now replaced the drive with one I know to work, so far so good.