UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_DISK - Please Help

Ok, so I tried to boot up my computer last night and a blue screen popped up with a "UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_DISK" error. It said to restart and if that didn't work to hit F8 and boot in Safe Mode. I tried that and then it just start listing system32/drivers and then continued onto the same blue screen. I'm baffled as to what to do here. I'm currently looking for my disks that came with my laptop (Dell). Any advice would be much appreciated.

More than likely your hard drive died. Find and run a hard drive testing program on your drive -- something like Ontrack, or Hitachi Drive Fitness Test which can be found on the Ultimate Boot CD, among many other useful programs.

I'm curiuos what brand of HDD it is that's in that Dell. I'm guessing Maxtor.

[Chief911]

It can be two things.

1. Your boot sector got corrupted. This will happen after you do something like run a defrag or whatnot.
2. Your hard drive failed and is dead.

You need to run a util on it to see if its failing, or just a bad boot sector. When I have more time maybe I'll see if I can link you to something.

But have you tried google?

Nick

Yes, I've googled this error and it actually didn't give many hits for how to fix the problem. Some of the threads mentioned "chkdsk/r and fixmbr" as possible methods to fix the problem. I'm not even sure what they are talking about but the people in the fourms that tried those commands said that they didn't paricularly work.

I haven't really been able to search all that much because this happened just last night and I've been at work all day. But, I would definitely appreciate it if you could provide some links and/or instructions on how to battle this.

Before yoy futz around with chkdsk /r, or fixmbr you should determine in the drive is even salvagable. Thus you should google Ultimate Boot CD. Burn it to a disc. Boot to the disc. Then run the Hitachi Hard Drive Fitness Test, or a test the corresponds with the manufacturer of your hard drive.

If it passes, boot to the XP cd (asuming you are on XP) and run chkdsk /r from the repair console. More on that later. Right now, figure out if the drive is good or your are just wasting your time with the command line fixes.

First off, thanks for the advice. I downloaded Ultimate Boot CD and got it working with fairly little resistance. I ran the Hitachi Hard Drive Fitness Test (Quick Test) and it returned saying that I had one or more corrupted sectors. I had the option of rewritting the whole drive or just repairing and erasing the corrupted sectors. I just returned to the menu.

I'm currently running the Hitachi Hard Drive Fitness Test (Advanced Test).

Let me know what you think about the results from the Quick test and I'll post the Advanced results as soon as I get them. Thanks again.

*Oh, the actual error is UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_ VOLUME . I'm not sure if this makes much of a difference.

Sweetness! I found a page on Microsoft that described my problem and gave a solution. (The article can be found here (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q297185) .)

I put in my XP installation CD and went into the Recovery Module. The problem fixed itself when I used the chkdsk /r command. Now I'm back up and running and backing up all my Poker info. Phew! /images/graemlins/cool.gif

Thanks to everyone that provided me with advice.