WinXP bootup nightmare - unmountable_boot_volume

[jopijedd52]

Afternoon all.

 

I've got a PC from one of the offices at the primary school i support. It has a single SATA hard drive with two partitions (OS and Recovery) which is currently hanging during boot into XP.

 

The error given is unmountable_boot_volume and the second address is 0xC0000006, which i haven't found a suitable solution for yet online.

 

Now, i've attempted to go through the normal procedure of booting up on a WinXP disc and going through recovery console, but it can't see the drive. The only partition shown on the drive is the HP Recovery one. Likewise, when i put the drive into an external dock on another PC, it identifies the recovery partition but cannot read the OS partition.

 

I'm now a bit out of ideas as to how to go about trying to constructively get the data off the drive (as a bare minimum) or restore the XP install on there (ideal).

 

Any ideas very welcome!

[Mr.Ben]

Have you tried the disk in another PC?

 

Unmountable Boot Volumes generally mean one of two things to me: 1, the disk has seen better days and has failed or 2, the power supply in the machine is failing to provide power to the unit.

[jopijedd52]

Have you tried the disk in another PC?

 

Unmountable Boot Volumes generally mean one of two things to me: 1, the disk has seen better days and has failed or 2, the power supply in the machine is failing to provide power to the unit.

 

I've tried the drive in an external SATA dock, which works fine for every other SATA HDD i have around here.

 

As it spins up and shows the partition with the HP Recovery guff on it, i'm thinking its a problem in that specific partition rather than the HDD as a whole.

[synaesthesia]

Heh, saw this for the first time at a school on Thursday. Easy fix though, used a popular bootable multi-util CD and the drive manufacturer's utility to scan and repair the drive. Once that was done, the drive was bootable and useable, hopefully long enough for the replacement drive to arrive and for me to fit on my next visit Was just a couple of bad sectors in precisely the wrong place.