xp schmexpee

[rokucheeba.livejournal.com]

unmountable boot volume.
what is this "unmountable boot volume" that you speak of, dear xp?

i gotta fix this pos - that doesn't boot up to xp, even if it asks you
if you want to boot to safe mode, normal etc ..

now whenever i pick one of the options, it says:
unmountable boot volume

i've tried to format it and it says it doesn't reconize the c: drive,
but when i go to the c: drive it says "ram drive".

now, does anybody have any answers? please, and thanks.

Comments

[drnazo.livejournal.com]

Look at this document (http://support.gateway.com/s/issues/158032510.shtml) first and see if that fixes your problem. Might as well try this before doing the format.

As far as the formatting goes... Chances are the drive is NTFS so it wouldn't exactly be much like formatting a 9x drive. Although, the drive could be faulty. The best thing to do would be to run a good ol trusty program called GWSCAN (ftp://ftp.gateway.com/pub/hardware_support/drivers/win3.x_and_dos/mass_storage/hard_drives/7510801.exe) from Gateway that tests the drive. If it's fine I would do a low level format on the drive using GWSCAN to write zeros to the drive. After that, fdisk, format, and boot up from the XP disk and let it format the drive in whatever format you like and continue with the install. This seems to be the most reliable way.

Good luck.

[kalidor.livejournal.com]

it kinda sounds like a bad boot record. You may wanna try going to recovery console, as they do in the document above, and run the fixmbr command. That will rebuild your boot record and hopefully fix it if that is the only problem.

[oddball42.livejournal.com]

there is another item in the recovery console, the fdisk /mbr and or fixboot (type help should be one of two options regarding disk/boot)

[gemini6678.livejournal.com]

I was going to suggest that. What I wanted to know, is if the drive isn't being seen, is he booting with an old Win9X Boot Disk? Or with the Windows XP Disk? Is his system Dual Boot or Single OS? As idiotic as this sounds, did you try to re-seat the cables, both power and data? I've seen that rack out the best techs. lol.

If you are booting with 9x boot disk, that won't see the drive at all, therefore C: will appear as the RamDrive, which is what 98 boot disks do when booted from, since they need to load your command files somewhere. If you're using the XP cd, you should try as he said above. Use the recovery console, and for shits and giggles, try to chose the option "Repair a windows Install", and see if it selects your xp install or finds it. Then you'll know if the drive itself is ok as far as it being seen. Worse case, check the bios.

[fatherforgiveme.livejournal.com]

If you update a pirated version of 2k or XP it will do that to your machine as well (I know this is an old topic and all, but I thought I'd chime in).