[Stephen_K]

We switched on our PC last night and have got an unmountable boot error.

The PC is under 12 months old so we don't have a problem getting a new hard drive as we think the one we have is faulty and will be replaced. PC is a Dell Dimension.

However, my partner Foxybaby, designs loads of stuff for the Sims 2 and has around 3GB of designs on this hard drive. We want to try and recover as much of these files as possible.

Windows XP was pre installed so we don't have any of the windows CD's or recover disks.

The only solutions I can come up with is we need a copy of the Windows XP recovery CD to boot the hard drive up and attempt a repair.

Or put the faulty hard drive in my PC and try and access it. No idea how to do this though.

Any help would be much appreciated?

Edited by Stephen_K, 14 April 2006 - 03:54 AM.

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I feel that if the drive itself is faulty the repair is not going to work, and I would wait for more sounder advice than mine however when you say faulty do you hear a tick, tick, tick as the disk turns. Can you give a clearer picture here then.

[fleamailman]

I feel that if the drive itself is faulty the repair is not going to work, and I would wait for more sounder advice than mine however when you say faulty do you hear a tick, tick, tick as the disk turns. Can you give a clearer picture here then.

[Stephen_K]

We ran the diagnostics on the drive and it failed read/write on one block and passed everything else.

We have just had a call from Dell saying that it is a 'known issue' with the new windows update and we have to reset the PC back to factory settings which will delete everything else on the hard drive.

I might be wrong here as my knowledge is limited, but I don't see how a software upgrade would corrupt a block on the hard drive?

It sounds like that the hard drive has been faulty since we got it and the error has corrupted windows file tables or whatever they are called.

[fleamailman]

What exactly are you getting on the screen then, do you get to your desktop, can you get into safemode, how far can we get here?

[Stephen_K]

We get a screen which says windows has detected a problem....

It lets you select Last Known Configuration, Safe Mode etc but after this we get a blue screen which says Unmountable Boot error and we have to turn the PC off.

We can run the Dell Diagnostics before we reach the first screen.

[fleamailman]

Um, that rules out using those then and a recovey tool directly. So I guess the choices remain, using a linux bootable CD, or taking out the drive and after changing jumper slots placing it a slae in a second comp or best just putting it in an external harddrive box, but I am not sure because it isn't a corrupted windows but dodgy harddrive.

[Stephen_K]

Cheers.

I am going to try and get a windows recovery CD over the weekend and try and boot the computer that way and see if I can temporary fix it to at least get the files we want off the hard drive.

Then try the reset back to original factory settings although I doubt that would make any difference!

[Stephen_K]

I have managed to fix the hard drive fault.

Here's what I did as it might help a few others out there.

I found a utility called Bart PE which creates a XP Bootable CD with utilities from my other PC's Windows XP installation files. This was dead easy to follow.

I downloaded the software and ran it on my other PC which has Windows XP Home Edition too.

The software checks for the XP installation files and extracts what is required and burns them all to CD for you.

Next went to the broken PC and booted up and pressed F12 to access the boot menu and it allowed me to select the CD Rom Drive then when the machine booted up from the CD I selected the command prompt and type chkdsk c: /r

This scanned the hard drive and marked the errors found and recovered a few files in the bad sectors.

It took a while to run but once it had finished I re-booted the PC using the hard drive and it worked fine. We are now backing up the hard drive! Result!

Edited by Stephen_K, 14 April 2006 - 12:30 PM.

[fleamailman]

Thanks, I always love feedback good or bad and I will bear it in mind next time. Happy you got in that way then.

[Stephen_K]

The last resort was putting the hard drive into my other PC.

I think we are still going to get Dell to replace the hard drive as it's defo that which caused the problem and nothing to do with windows upgrade.

Interestingly, the guy who made the program I used said that Microsoft don't supply bootable XP CD Roms for pre installed machines and only give them out to network administrators of big companies etc.

Just as well he saw a gap in the market and made his own!

[fleamailman]

Yes, that is correct and that is why bart PE and Koppex linux seem to used a lot. Oh, and sorry I made you clean the comp then. :-) whops, sorry wrong thread.

Edited by fleamailman, 14 April 2006 - 01:12 PM.