unmountable_boot_volume

kona12 · #1 10-15-2006, 01:17 AM

My dell insperion has windows xp and last week when firing it up, instead of starting, I got a blue window with an unmountable_boot_volume error message. It tells me to start in safe mode and remove recent hardware adds. It won't start in safe mode though. This is extremely bad timing as the laptop I used to back up all of the files on the broken one was recently stolen so now I have no access to my stuff. Is there anything I can do?

*Raistlfiren* · #2 10-15-2006, 01:30 AM

Have you looked at this article : http://support.microsoft.com/kb/297185 ? Maybe that may get you started on your issue. Mainly what it is telling you to do is to do the following.

First get out your Windows XP CD and stick it into your drive.
Second, whenever you get to the Welcome Screen, click "r" to go to repair mode.
Type in your Admin password, or if you don't have one set press "ENTER".
After doing that type chkdsk /r in the console.

See if that works out at all for you.

Rat

kona12 · #3 10-16-2006, 03:57 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Raistlfiren

Have you looked at this article : http://support.microsoft.com/kb/297185 ? Maybe that may get you started on your issue. Mainly what it is telling you to do is to do the following.

First get out your Windows XP CD and stick it into your drive.
Second, whenever you get to the Welcome Screen, click "r" to go to repair mode.
Type in your Admin password, or if you don't have one set press "ENTER".
After doing that type chkdsk /r in the console.

See if that works out at all for you.

Rat

Thanks for the suggestions,they seemed to work but wasn't sure what todo next so I talked with one of the guys at my work who suggested 'fixboot' then removing cd and rebooting. This seems to have worked but now I am wondering is the stable/permanent or am I a click or a crash away from loosing everything? Is there womething else I need to do?

Thanks again!

*Raistlfiren* · #4 10-16-2006, 04:16 PM

Hmmm... I don't wuite understand what you mean about that. If your wondering if Windows may crash on you some time again, then it is very possible. Windows isn't the best OS, in my personal opinion. Anything can likely happen when running Windows.

How much are you backing up ? If it is just a few pictures or something, just copy them onto a cd or dvd. Another way to be sure is just putting it on an external drive. They have external hard drives for reasonable prices also. One other way is just making two partitions on your original hard drive in your laptop. One for DATA and another for Windows. So say your Window partition crashes, you can then just reformat that partition and start over. You will still have all of your data on the other partition.

Rat