Blue Screen - Unbootable_Boot_Volume

[Roady]

Hello again all

I have a Dell Inspiron Laptop only12 mths old with Visat home edition, and on boot up shortly after when it just gets into the Windows scrolling yellow bar with Windows logo the Laptop Blue Screens with UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME error.
The laptop came with Dells default partitions on the HD with a Recovery partition with all the tools that I have tried to no joy and also comes with an error on a full restore back to factory defaults!!

I then inserted the Dell disk that came with the latop to fully restore Vista loosing all data but it does not recognise the c: partition as it greyed out. You can delete and change other partitions but not the C: drive one, as it seems, its not formatted.

I have now managed to install a fresh copy of XP as this let me format the C: drive to NTFS and it went on ok. I installed Partition magic and it errored saying there is a corrupt drive letter at beginning of the disk!!

I then went to install Vista again using the Dell disk and I got a bit further this time, it installed and when it rebooted the same blue screen appears!! It does not like Vista now I think.

My next step im going to take (as I had to stop as it was getting late last night) I think is to delete all partitions and make one new partition using the full disk and start again.
What would be best way to do this?

Thanks

[Paul Komski]

I learned the following some time ago from the superb Goodells site (http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/dellmbr.htm). It is one reason for keeping a backup of the mbr on Dells that have a restore partition on them. Dont overwrite such an MBR by wiping a drive or of using fdisk /mbr or of installing any boot manager to the MBR (including GRUB or LILO if attempting to dual boot Linux), and which can often be a temptation in these circumstances. If necessary delete all partitions except the restore partition (which leaves the MBR code intact) and then boot to an installation CD.

If the original Dell MBR is intact and you get a single blue line at the top of the initial black screen, with "www.dell.com" in white-on-blue text. This blue line will pause for exactly 2.0 seconds before reading the keyboard buffer to see if any keypresses are in the queue. (The 2-second pause is actually programmed into the MBR code, so this is not an approximate number.) If during this 2 second interval you press CTRL + F11 you should be able to initiate a factory restore.

What would be best way to do this?
Fdisk or BiNG or GParted or PartitionMagic should all be able to delete the partitions for you. Just be aware of losing any restore partition and boot sector if they are important to you.

[Roady]

Ok thanks for advice.

I beleive Fdisk does not recognise drives over 20gig, the one in the laptop is 120gig!!!! So i would have to make lots of 20gig partitions if ths was true which I dont want.
Will Bing be better for me? Do I have to make a bootable usb stick of cd, which is ok for me!

I really want to keep the restore partition so I wont delete it.

[Paul Komski]

Well as most know I'm a big BiNG fan because it is so versatile and has caused me so few problems. It costs nothing to try it out and it runs well from either a boot floppy or a boot CD or even (should you decide to do so when you get used to it) by installing it to the hard drive.

With fdisk it depends on the version as to what it can "see" but the one from FreeDOS (http://www.freedos.org/cgi-bin/lsm.cgi?mode=lsm&lsm=base/fdisk.lsm) should have no problems. As long as any version of fdisk can see the partition tables (on the mbr or sector 0) then though it may not be able to accurately create large partitions it should be able to delete existing partitions, which is all you are trying to do, or set a partition as active.

You can also of course delete all existing partitions as part of WinXP's setup routine.

[Sylvander]

The old version of Fdisk did not recognize the full Size of Hard Disks larger than 64 GB (http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=263044).
The updated version "provides support for FAT32 [and NTFS], which allows you to create partitions larger than 2GB" [32 GB].
[I've made maximum of 30 GB FAT32 partitions on 80 GB HDD's]

The updated version was issued with WinME I believe.

Bob Cerelli's Win98SE Boot floppy includes the updated version (http://www.onecomputerguy.com/install/floppies.htm#boot_floppy).

I also have/use BiNG, but also like using fdisk; usually the updated copy that runs from the [DOS 7.10 command prompt provided on the] "Emergency Boot CD" = EBCD.

[Roady]

Sylvander

That link does not seem to work!!

All
In the end I used SmartFDISK where I deleted ALL partitions and created two new ones using its GUI Interface which is quite handy.
I then installed Vista using Dells restore disk for the laptop and all ok, happy days!!

So that says to me that there must of been some corruption on the Recovery partition, even though this was not the boot partition (D:) and was causing the BSOD in the first place!!!!

[Sylvander]

For Bob Cerelli's Win98SE boot floppy...
I was taken HERE (http://www.onecomputerguy.com/software_download.htm), and clicked on the link shown in the screenshot below.
The file win98_img.exe was then downloaded to a location specified by me. :)

Here's the download dialog for the file to make that boot floppy. (http://www.onecomputerguy.com/software/win98_img.exe)