unmountable boot volume

[jeff-nj]

Hello. I have a Dell Inspiron 1100 laptop running XP. For reasons unknown, I got the blue death screen with the message "unmountable_boot_volume". (I'm guessing I got hit by a virus as my anti-virus software had expired.)

Google searches indicate I should use my recovery cd to recover from the unmountable_boot_ volume error. All I have (or should say all I have found) is a Dell "Reinstallation CD" (Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition including Service Pack 1) for the Inspiron 1100.

It appears to me that the Reinstallation CD is not the Recovery CD. It is possible that the laptop also came with a Recovery CD but I cannot find it.

My question to this forum is: Can I use the Reinstallation CD or do I actually need a Recovery CD to recover from this problem? And if I need a Recovery CD, how can I replace a lost Recovery CD?

Many thanks.

[NooNoo]

Welcome to Windrivers Jeff

A "recovery" cd is often an image on cd of the factory settings of the pc or laptop.
A reinstallation cd is more flexble in that it contains what you need to be able to install windows and the drivers. Now the tricky bit - one person's reinstallation is another person's recovery - so bottom line, your cd could be either.

I believe, however that the dell reinstallation cd is exactly that - a copy of windows. If you boot from the cd you should be able to setup windows over the top of the old windows thereby sorting out your error message. Having said that, it may just be a coincidence that your hard drive died and cannot be mounted... rather than a virus just screwing it up for you.

[jeff-nj]

Thanks!

Next question/concern - is there any way to determine that the hard drive has actually died? Because I'm more concerned about data recovery (digital pictures mainly) that about the laptop not working right now.

Thanks!

[NooNoo]

there are a number of ways you can check (no unplugging it, giving it a shake and putting it back is not one of them).

Do you have a floppy drive? Boot from a floppy diskette and navigate to the drive using dos - this only works on fat32 drives with a 98 boot diskette - if it's ntfs you will need ntfs for dos (http://www.ntfs.com/products.htm)

No floppy? Then boot with a cd instead. You can boot to recovery console using the xp cd if you have the adminstrator password.

Or remove the drive and use an adapter or usb caddy to read the drive on another machine.

[cheeseh]

Boot off of your dell cd (which is just an oem copy of windows btw), then go to the recovery console. Try running "chkdsk /r" without the quotes. I have seen this fix maybe 75 percent of the unmountable boot volume errors I have come across. If that doesn't fix it the drive is probably going bad and it is not just a software problem.

[jeff-nj]

This is – forgive me – a long description to the Unmountable Boot Volume problem I’m having with my Dell Inspiron 1100 laptop running XP Service Pack 1.

What follows is the complete history of everything I've done, did, or can remember....

One day not too long ago I got the unfortunate blue screen of death with the error message “Unmountable Boot Volume”. I consulted Google and this forum and got some helpful suggestions (thanks!) that got me further along.

I only have a purple Dell XP re-installation CD but do not have or could not find a Recovery CD.

I re-booted the laptop with the XP re-installation CD in it. When it looked like it was trying to re-install XP (it said “Loading Windows”), I turned the laptop off not wanting to have the hard drive reformatted. I don’t think this caused any damage as ultimately when I was talking with the Dell technician, we got past this stage multiple times to other Reinstallation/Recovery options.

Yesterday, I had an IM Chat with a Dell tech support guy who helped me confirm via a quick diagnostic test that the hard drive is functioning fine, that is, the hard drive didn’t fail, but somehow the operating system on the hard drive has been corrupted in some manner. He told me I had to call the Dell Help Desk for further support.

45 minutes waiting on the phone and $80 poorer, I finally got to work with the Help Desk person. She and I were on the phone for another hour trying to determine what the problem was. That wasn’t successful and is why I’m consulting this forum again.

Using the Reinstallation CD (not a Recovery CD which I don’t have), Dell and I tried to Repair the hard drive and successfully performed a Fixboot procedure for some kind of a partial repair. We tried to “FIXMBR” or something similar (I can’t recall), but that would have required us to reformat the hard drive. I’ve got over a year’s worth of digital pictures I’m trying to recover, so we didn’t try to FIXMBR.

Then we took a look at the hard disk partition and it looked something like this:

--: Partition 1 [FAT] 39 MB (39 MB free)
C: Partition 2 [Unknown] 19060 MB (19060 MB free)
Unused Space (??) 8 MB (8 MB free)

At this point, I think I reached the end of the script for this Dell technician and the only option was to reinstall XP and reformat the hard drive. Something I didn’t want to do and didn’t do.

It appeared to the Dell tech that I don’t have XP installed at all!? Her earlie plan was to install a parallel instance of XP and then I’d be able to retrieve my data and ultimately I’d have to reformat the drive. But that wasn’t possible as there wasn’t an XP instance to be found for which we could install a parallel instance.

Of course, with precious digital pictures on that hard drive, I’m in no hurry to reformat the hard drive.

When I discussed this situation with a colleague, it was his feeling that the data files can probably be recovered, if not from the help of this forum, then from one of those Data Recovery firms. But I’m hoping to avoid having to pay many hundreds of $$$ for them to recover my files.

There is one thing I should mention and that is what I was doing before I got the blue death screen. I had just put a few mp3s on a USB pen drive and had successfully stopped the USB device so I could safely remove it. Within moments of removing the USB device, the blue death screen appeared.

That’s where it started and now I’m hoping that kind and learned members of this forum can help me recover my files!!!

MANY THANKS!!!!

[cheeseh]

Did you try what I said in my last post? If you do and that does not fix it, then yes you can install a "parallel" copy of winxp and retrieve your data if it is still there. All you have to do to install a second copy of windows is boot off of your xp cd (again the purple xp reinstallation cd you have is just a full oem copy of windows xp), choose to install windows, if it says that it finds another copy of windows already on the drive just choose the option to install a fresh copy and choose to use a different directory than c:\windows. If it does not say it found another copy of windows on the drive then you could have more problems, because that means your previous installation is not being seen. If this is the case I would recommend NOT installing windows on the drive again, instead I would hook that drive up to another bootable system as a slave drive, and running a data recovery program on the drive to retrieve your data.