[RyanSeanH]

Hello,
I'm getting the ol' unmountable_boot_volume blue screen of death in regular and safe mode. I tried running chkdsk from the XP recovery C:\> prompt but got the following error "The specified drive is not valid, or there is no disk in the drive".

When I run map I get the following output:

? FAT16 39MB \Device\Harddisk0\Partition1

? 52039MB \Device\Harddisk0\Partition2

? 3711MB \Device\Harddisk0\Partition3

D: \Device\CdRom0

I'm not sure what to try next. It looks like its not recognizing Partition2 as C:.

Any ideas?

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We're going to have to take this in small steps, we'll try one thing at a time. Here are the instructions for repairing your bootloader:

First, put the XP CD into the drive. Then, turn off your computer. Turn the computer back on and immediately start tapping the <F12> key, maybe once or twice a second. This will get you to the Boot Device Selection menu. Arrow down to Onboard or USB CD-ROM Drive and press Enter. You'll see a message that says "Press any key to boot from the CD-ROM drive...", when you see this message, press Enter again. You should then see a blue screen that says "Windows is copying files..." down at the bottom. If you do not see this message, please reboot the computer and try again.

You'll eventually get to a screen that says "Welcome to Windows Setup." Press the R key to Repair Windows using the Recovery Console. A black screen will come up asking you which installation you want to log onto, press 1 and then Enter. If it asks you for an administrator password, just leave it blank and press Enter, unless you know that you set up an Administrator password, in which case use that password.

You'll get to a prompt that is like a DOS Prompt, that says C:\WINDOWS>_. Type in fixboot and press Enter. A confirmation message will come up and then get you back to the flashing cursor. Type in exit and press Enter, which will reboot your computer automatically. Let it reboot, and see if it gets you into Windows.

Report back with your results!

[The Admiral]

We're going to have to take this in small steps, we'll try one thing at a time. Here are the instructions for repairing your bootloader:

First, put the XP CD into the drive. Then, turn off your computer. Turn the computer back on and immediately start tapping the <F12> key, maybe once or twice a second. This will get you to the Boot Device Selection menu. Arrow down to Onboard or USB CD-ROM Drive and press Enter. You'll see a message that says "Press any key to boot from the CD-ROM drive...", when you see this message, press Enter again. You should then see a blue screen that says "Windows is copying files..." down at the bottom. If you do not see this message, please reboot the computer and try again.

You'll eventually get to a screen that says "Welcome to Windows Setup." Press the R key to Repair Windows using the Recovery Console. A black screen will come up asking you which installation you want to log onto, press 1 and then Enter. If it asks you for an administrator password, just leave it blank and press Enter, unless you know that you set up an Administrator password, in which case use that password.

You'll get to a prompt that is like a DOS Prompt, that says C:\WINDOWS>_. Type in fixboot and press Enter. A confirmation message will come up and then get you back to the flashing cursor. Type in exit and press Enter, which will reboot your computer automatically. Let it reboot, and see if it gets you into Windows.

Report back with your results!

[RyanSeanH]

When I get into the Recovery Console I get the standard output followed by this message:

The path or file specified is not valid.
C:\>

When I run fixboot I get the following msg: (the 1st sentence looks like a typo but its word for word)
C:\fixboot
The target partition is The file system on the startup partition is unknown.
FIXBOOT is attempting to detect the file system type.

FIXBOOT cannot open the partition.

C:>

When I reboot I get the same unmountable_boot_volume bsod.

I have an Ultimate Boot CD and Partition Table Doctor also which I've messed around with a little but haven't used to change anything because its all over my head.

Thanks for the quick response!

Edited by RyanSeanH, 01 December 2008 - 05:03 PM.

[The Admiral]

Awesome!

In Partition Table Doctor, all we need to know is what it sees, how big the drive is, what file system it is using. It should be NTFS.

Tell me what you see, and we'll go from there.

[RyanSeanH]

Ok, here's my recreation of the Partition Table Doctor 3.0 screen -

Partition       Active         System                Label               Start (c,h,s)    Space(MB)1                No              Hidden FAT16                              0,1,1              392                Yes             HPFS/NTFS                                 5,0,1               52038x 3              No               Hidden FAT32                             6639,0,1          3710                 No              [Free]                                       7112,0,1          7

(in codebox as an attempt to preserve formatting)


Also - not sure if this is relevant - when I boot into safe mode I get 'loading Vax347b.sys, press esc to cancel' and then the bsod. I've looked this up and found some people talk about the file being related to the Alcohol 120 program. I guess some other people have had problems with it.

I've used the Rebuild partition table (RPT) operation in Partition Table Doctor and it labels partition 1 C: and makes it active and partition 2 and 3 Not active. I couldn't get it to label partition 2 as C:\

Just throwing a couple things out there

Thanks for you help

[The Admiral]

Good, at least we know that the file system is there. Let's try a couple more things to get Partition 2 set as active, and restore the MBR.

Let's boot into the Recovery Console on the XP CD again. From there, type in diskpart and press Enter, which will get us into the disk partitioning program. At the DISKPART> prompt, type in select disk 0 and press Enter, selecting the hard drive, then select partition 2 and press Enter, selecting the partition. Type in active and press Enter to make the partition active, and you'll see a confirmation message. Type exit to get out of DISKPART. Then type the command fixmbr and press Enter. Again, a confirmation message, and the master boot record will be rewritten. Type in exit and press Enter to exit the Recovery Console and reboot the computer.

Please report back with the results!

[RyanSeanH]

Alright - I'm in the diskpart screen which shows 3 partitions. Here's what it looks like:

[codebox]
E: Partition1 (Inactive (OS/2 Boot Man 39MB (31MB free)
-: Partition2 [Unknown] 52039 MB (52038 MB free)
-: Partition3 (Inactive (OS/2 Boot Man 3710 MB ( 0 MB free)
[/codebox]

When I press enter nothing happens - I tried on all 3 partitions. I'm given the option to Create a partition in the unpartition space or Delete a partition.

I'm a little worried about that 52038MB free thing - Looks like boot doctore recognizes it as ntfs but winxp doesn't?

Thank you