Computer is FUBAR...Any suggestions?
 

There I was happily clicking around on eBay looking for a bigger hard drive, when an unexpected (are they ever really expected?) split-second power outage/spike shut me down.

When I tried to restart, it says "UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME" and will not restart even under safe mode.

I finally decided to run a repair on the my XP Pro installation (not using recovery console). Well, it went straight to the installation page after the agreement, rather than giving the usual repair option. That generally means it did not find a version of Windows already on the drive or that it is very seriously corrupted. Hmm.

I then tried to repair through recovery console using FITBOOT. It did say the boot sectors were bad and supposedly fixed them, but I'm getting the same problem.

What else can I try?

I suppose the problem can be hardware based, but I do use surge protectors (not that that is 100% effective). What do you think?

Thanks in advance.

-Logan

buy a new one im pretty sure that will fix the problem

Dude, your getting a dell (tm)!

some times a system can go into shock, unplug power let sit for 15min and plug it back in. sometimes helps

since the trouble - have you turned it COMPLETELY off
for at least 10 minutes and then back on and see if it comes up...

I know that sounds simple... and stupid...
but... it has worked for me before...

sometimes mine overheats and acts qwirkie...

Good Luck...

~DomainBELL (Patricia)

Yeah...I tried letting it sit and restarting, but that unfortunately didn't do anything. Unless someone can suggest something else, I'm going to try putting in an old hard drive, installing xp on it and see what happens. If it works, then it's probably not hardware related. Then I can at least backup some data and reinstall...

Anyone know the best place to get cheap components if I want to build my own computer?

http://www.pricewatch.com - http://www.newegg.com :thumbsup

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/297185

have you tried this?

Sounds like your drive is dying.

If it is you can try putting the old one in a fridge or freezer for abit until its cold then copy everything over to a new one

thanks for the reminder to always back up

good luck solving your problem

Thanks for the link. I'll research the code a little more when I put the hard drive back in. I just put in an old 6GB and installed XP, and it works fine. So the problem is either XP or the old hard drive. I feared the hard drive's days were numbered, which is one reason I was looking to buy another, but most of the bad drives I found wouldn't register at all (i.e. no partitions even). Luckily, I do backup regularly, so I only lost some non-essentials and about 1-2 weeks of various work on files. Still the loss of time is a major PITA!

Thought someone might find the solution useful, although I can't really take credit for it...kind of happened by accident.

I ended up putting an old 6GB hard drive in and installing Windows on it, which worked fine. I was then curious if I could read the bad drive as a slave, so I installed it as such and rebooted. Windows (from the 6BG drive) automatically ran a checkdisk and corrected some errors on the bad drive. I tried reading the My Documents folder, but it was still protected. So for "shits and giggles" I tried booting from the bad drive again (as the master), and it worked just as normal, and I can access my files. I still don't trust the drive and will replace it, but at least I have time to back up anything that wasn't already backed up.