chancellor1970
New Member
Unmountable Boot Volume and CHKDSK Fails After Hard Shutdown
My HP computer with XP and a WD2500 hard drive has gone bad on me. I was browsing the internet to a site that had an application that was trying to play a sound file that no longer exists. This brought the machine to its knees. I then killed the IEXPLORE.EXE process that was consuming the most resources. At this point the machine become dispondent. I then manually turned off power via the power button. I wish at this point I had just been patient and waited
.
Upon reboot I get a black DOS screen telling me that windows failed to start. And I need to choose to boot in a Safe Mode, the last known good setting, or normal mode. None of these work. Given one of my HP boot options I could get a blue screen with the the Unmountable_Boot_Volume error.
So I boot the machine from an XP startup disk (not sure if its the same version as what I was running) and go into repair mode. From the DOS enviroment I see that the partition that contains XP and all my data is not readable when I attempt to look at the contents using "dir". I run a CHKDSK /R from the DOS enviroment. After a very long time it quits at 75% saying there are multiple errors.
My ideas at this point include:
1) Burn a Western Digital boot CD with hard drive diagnostic application and see what this finds. I would have already done this but I need to find a burner.
2) Use the FIXBOOT and FIXMBR commands from the XP startup disk in repair mode. But I fear doing this. Could this make things worse?
3) I am looking at magical SW such as Hard Drive Mechanic or DiskPatch. Do these types of applications actually work?
Does anyone have experience or knowledge of these issues that could recommend a reasonable approach. I fear that I know just enough to make things worse if I do the wrong things.
And I have been very negligent. There is very little backup on this hard drive. I have been thinking about doing it but keep getting distracted. This is a wake up call for the future. My next posts to these forums are going to be on what kind of SW should I use for backing things up.
Thanks in advance for any help. I really hope there is some way to get things going again. It feels like this is a SW issue given the way it crashed but what do I know.
Dave
My HP computer with XP and a WD2500 hard drive has gone bad on me. I was browsing the internet to a site that had an application that was trying to play a sound file that no longer exists. This brought the machine to its knees. I then killed the IEXPLORE.EXE process that was consuming the most resources. At this point the machine become dispondent. I then manually turned off power via the power button. I wish at this point I had just been patient and waited
.Upon reboot I get a black DOS screen telling me that windows failed to start. And I need to choose to boot in a Safe Mode, the last known good setting, or normal mode. None of these work. Given one of my HP boot options I could get a blue screen with the the Unmountable_Boot_Volume error.
So I boot the machine from an XP startup disk (not sure if its the same version as what I was running) and go into repair mode. From the DOS enviroment I see that the partition that contains XP and all my data is not readable when I attempt to look at the contents using "dir". I run a CHKDSK /R from the DOS enviroment. After a very long time it quits at 75% saying there are multiple errors.
My ideas at this point include:
1) Burn a Western Digital boot CD with hard drive diagnostic application and see what this finds. I would have already done this but I need to find a burner.
2) Use the FIXBOOT and FIXMBR commands from the XP startup disk in repair mode. But I fear doing this. Could this make things worse?
3) I am looking at magical SW such as Hard Drive Mechanic or DiskPatch. Do these types of applications actually work?
Does anyone have experience or knowledge of these issues that could recommend a reasonable approach. I fear that I know just enough to make things worse if I do the wrong things.
And I have been very negligent. There is very little backup on this hard drive. I have been thinking about doing it but keep getting distracted. This is a wake up call for the future. My next posts to these forums are going to be on what kind of SW should I use for backing things up.
Thanks in advance for any help. I really hope there is some way to get things going again. It feels like this is a SW issue given the way it crashed but what do I know.
Dave
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