New (to me) error message when booting up my PC.

[Orrex]

The system went through its normal startup routine but aborted shortly after the "welcome" screen came up. It listed the error as "Unmountable Boot Volume." It suggested that I restart the computer, which I did, but I got the same message.

How I might go about resolving this? It comes up whether I try to start in Safe Mode or in normal Windows mode. The system gets hung up and won't let me go any farther.

Additional info: When I attempted to use a boot disk, I got a successful prompt but couldn't access the hard drive (in essence, only the floppy drive itself was accessible). Also, when I put the hard drive into our other computer as a slave, the BIOS recognizes that the drive is there but still won't let me access it, neither through Explorer nor the DOS command prompt.

Any suggestions? I called a local Best Buy to see if they could attempt to recover my most vital files from the drive, but they charge $90 for the service. Of course, I would love to salvage the data from the drive if possible, but there's little on it that's so important that it justifies a $90 outlay on my very tight budget, especially considering that only 10 megs or so would really be a pain in the ass to rebuild/replace. I could try to run the "Restore" CD-Rom, but of course that would wipe out everything on the drive.

Any guesses as to what might have gone wrong or how I might fix it? I'm not entirely hardware-illiterate, but I confess that anything much more advanced than drive-swapping makes me a little nervous.

Thanks for whatever help or insight you can offer.

[mainegreen]

1. From a quick google search:

For win XP:

http://www.techtips4u.com/kb/sw/SW00014.htm

Looks easy.

[jayfish]

2. What Operating System Are You Using? -NT-

Jay

[Orrex]

3. Oh, I guess that would help...

Windows XP, which until now has always served me very well.

However, after Mainegreen's reply, I did some additional googling and came upon this article, which may be helpful.

I'm at work right now, but I'll see what I can do tonight, and I'll report back here with an update.

[jayfish]

4. From Your Artical...

go with the "Damaged File System option. The reason you cannot see the drive when you boot from floppy is that your drive is, most likely, formatted with the NTFS file system. DOS and DOS-based Windows cannot access NTFS drives without special software.

Jay

[hobbit709]

5. Sounds like a corrupted file in the boot sector

Win98 won't see NTFS but Win2000 will so if you jumper it as a slave on a W2K or XP system, you should be able to read the drive if the drive is OK. If you still can't read the drive, then you probably have a crashed drive. There are ways of reading data from a crashed drive but they take expensive equipment and software.

[Orrex]

6. That makes sense

Win98 won't see NTFS but Win2000 will so if you jumper it as a slave on a W2K or XP system, you should be able to read the drive if the drive is OK.

I tried to slave it off of a Win 98 system with no luck (and with no apparent harm to that computer, thank goodness), but it hadn't occurred to me that 98 wouldn't recognize the XP setup.

Thanks!

[HysteryDiagnosis]

7. Something that might interest you.......

www.ntfs.com