unmountable boot volume - recovery console not behaving

[palkot]

I figure after working on it for two hours it might be a good idea to try the reliable pc guide forums.

I have an HP 1.4G, 128MB, 60GB pc with windows XP installed (supposedly, I haven't seen any evidence of it yet).

It posts and I see the Win XP home splash screen for a couple seconds and then the blue error screen that says

UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME

Safe mode and last known good configuration do the same thing. So, not having the XP home CD, I made the six floppies and booted into the recovery console, but INSTEAD of giving me a familiar

1. C:\WINNT

it gave me

1. D:\MiniNT
2. D:\I386

Well I tried logging onto both of these and on each one did the

"chkdsk /p" and then "fixboot" and also

"chkdsk /r"

For each time I ran chkdsk, it said it couldn't find autochk.exe, which I guess should be at C:\WINDOWS\system32. But I'm thinking that since it didn't give me an option to boot into a C: volume, I wouldn't be able to access autochk.exe on the C: volume. (although i did try)

I tried running "fixboot" without the "chkdsk" and it said it rewrote the boot partition, but gave the same blue screen when I rebooted.

I also tried to get chkdsk to find autochk.exe on my Win XP Pro CD with no luck.


Any efforts on this problem, I commend you. Thanks a million.

[palkot]

p.s. failing everything else, if my symptoms say the xp partition is not repairable, are there programs out there that can recover files from damaged drives like this? because that's really what this is all about. thanks again

[Paul Komski]

First some questions.

• Is the full error message as at http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=297185
• Are you using FAT or NTFS
• Was WinXP running OK at all or is this after a new installation.

Looks like software/BIOS, since you can access the volume from the recovery console, but you could still try and recover stuff using GetDataBack for FAT or NTFS though this needs to be done from another partition or hard drive.

I would be inclined to try a Repair Installation

You could also try chkdsk /f from the recovery console which you should be able to access from the installation CD rather than all those floppies.

[palkot]

I'm pretty sure that was the error message.. the link you gave. The system was NTFS and it was running fine since they bought it however long ago.

The thing is, I can't access the volume from recovery console. It doesn't give the C:\WINNT as an option, so the chkdsk /f, /p, or /r didn't work. I had to use the floppies because I didn't have the XP home CD, just the Pro and they're not interchangeable.

I'll try those other links you gave for recovery and see what happens. Thanks!

[palkot]

Alright, well, stranger things have happened.

I got a copy of some data recovery software thinking I could use that to at least get the customer's files and reinstall. So I put a spare drive in the computer, installed my XP pro on it and put his drive in as a slave. When I booted, the fresh XP install on my C: saw his bad drive on E: and automatically ran chkdsk on it before booting. It fixed everything for me and I was able to access the partition when it finished booting.

So, thinking it was fixed, I took the spare drive out and put his drive in as the master. When it booted, it ran chkdsk for itself again and booted fine.

Of course it was riddled with viruses and XXXware, but I'm working on that.