Broken Comp (Unmountable Boot Volume)
I know there is a post on this, but it's a bit of a different problem.
I am helping a friend with the broken comp. I just got it yesterday and it's a 1.2 ghz celeron with i think 128 ram though i could be wrong. I know XP home edition was installed on it though. I don't know any of the specs beyond that. I get the blue unmountable boot volume regardless of what i do.
I tried booting from startup disks and Win XP home edition CD. I tried getting into the bios to change boot setup to start with the Rom but can't seem to get into it. It says Hit DEL to get into setup, and i do and get the black screen that says
"we apologize etc but windows did not start successfully etc"
and gives opitions of normal startup, 3 versions of safe modes and all give me the blue screen.
If I don't hit del to get to setup, it goes to the black apology screen and then the blue screen.
Any suggestions?
thanks!
Edit: mother board is a PCChips 758LMR
I am helping a friend with the broken comp. I just got it yesterday and it's a 1.2 ghz celeron with i think 128 ram though i could be wrong. I know XP home edition was installed on it though. I don't know any of the specs beyond that. I get the blue unmountable boot volume regardless of what i do.
I tried booting from startup disks and Win XP home edition CD. I tried getting into the bios to change boot setup to start with the Rom but can't seem to get into it. It says Hit DEL to get into setup, and i do and get the black screen that says
"we apologize etc but windows did not start successfully etc"
and gives opitions of normal startup, 3 versions of safe modes and all give me the blue screen.
If I don't hit del to get to setup, it goes to the black apology screen and then the blue screen.
Any suggestions?
thanks!
Edit: mother board is a PCChips 758LMR
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I just unplugged the mother board power source and plugged it back in. Got me into bios and i set cd rom as first boot and hd as second, but now it's not doing anything.
Getting into BIOS didn't work before and i couldn't boot via the cd rom.
Some friends i've been talking about it with think it may be a motherboard problem. I was thinking it was file damnage or hd somewhere due to the error message.
Tomorrow i'll swap the hd with mine and see if it's bad or infected or whatever.
You may need to force the boot.ini to go into Safe Mode, possibly safe mode with networking, directly. Reason is this: In normal boot mode, if you manage to shut down the power to a box that is CHKDSKing or defragging its HD when shut down with power switch (or if a power glitch manages to cause box to reboot while this is going on), there is a registry key set that is set to locked values to lock out access to the file system areas being worked on (CHKDSK locks the whole volume being worked on until it completes and the file system is good, then AFTER THAT CHKDSK UNLOKCS the file system for that volume).
The boot sequence does NOT unlock this in a normal mode Windows bootup run as the bootup starts. Instead, CHKDSK can't get to the volume, it is marked as in use from a previous registry key setting-- it is also possible for boot.ini to play a role in the locking and unlocking. CHKDSK, with a real bad volume, might fix on a second pass after an automatic reboot what it cannot fix on a first pass, also.
OTOH, if you force the box into safe mode booting in boot.ini, CHKDSK is able to run as safe mode boot DOES unlock file system in a sense-- soem of the locks put into place in normal mode booting of Windows (or in a previous session before this happens, as explained above) never happen, others may be reset to unlocked. BUT, it does work this way, CHKDSK can run from a boot into safe mode and you get less Unmountable Boot Volume problems out of XP this way than by trying to do CHKDSK within a normal boot. 2000 Pro and Server is also responsive to this strategy.
To get into BIOS, you need to almost hit the DEL key once a sec almost before the Hit DEL to enter setup message appears, and the faster the box the more likely you will have to be hitting that key AS the message appears. IF you get to where you are getting, then you need to hit DEL earlier and possibly tap it once every second to 1.5 seconds.
NOW, there is one more thing.... A Win2K Install CD will not let you recover an XP file system right, journals can be mashed doing so. Basically, you CAN put the whole HD in a Win XP Pro box as an aux HD (if the Win XP Pro box boots from primary master HD, this sick FS HD can be mounted as slave on primary), fix file system from the Win XP Pro boot, then put it back into the old computer it normally "lives" in and run XP Home that way.
There is one problem that is not easily fixable this way--- over a long time or with lots of files being erased and replaced, the Master File Table can get fragmented. After a while the MFT gets too many fragments. The best thing to do with this situation is to mimage the data off to another HD, then recreate the parts on old HD, then transfer the data back in safe mode as admin or from a Recovery Console, then you have your old data and a new $MFT file as part of the green coded files you cannot really see but which are there. That file will no longer be fragged, will have been created new with less fragments (probably 1-2). I have an MFT with three fragments here, am thinking about doing just this little thing before I get into problems that are severe.
I changed the boot sequence to cd rom first and when I tried to boot with XP cd, it did nothing, literally.
I had to reset mb again and set boot sequence to floppy and tried to use XP boot disk, again, nothing happened.
I reset and make HD first in boot sequence and i get the black apology screen (still can't get into bios by hitting del) and then the unmountable boot volume screen.
I disconnect the HD and start it up, it can't find the HD so it asks for a systems disk in the floppy, i put the floppy in and it starts to load but that does no good cause there's no HD attached.
The harddrive had already been cleaned of important files. everything on it can be lost without hesitation.
I'm being told by friends the mb is fried. After looking up the error message I thought i'd be simple to fix but i guess it couldn't be that easy, hehe.
PCChips 758LMR
I don't think they make 'em anymore. Someone suggested as a very last resort, I try flashing the bios or something. I may try that after I make sure the HD is good.
Hope it works out for you. If not, a replacement board with similar specs could be had (most likely "used") for not too much money.
I yanked the harddrive and put it on an old gateway. I'm in the process of formating the harddrive. I'll try and install a OS on it and check it for integerity and such. If it now works, i'll put the gateway harddrive i know is good into the one i'm fixing to check the MB and all the other parts.
It'll probably be a mixture of problems.
Thanks for all the help. I may be updating depending on how it goes.
btw, it's a hell of a lot more enjoyable fixing comps when you don't want to use it ...