Unmountable boot volume

[jankohrasko]

Hi,
My friend's PC with WIN XP don't want to start saying : UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME.
What is the reason of this?
Thanks for help.

[kev7555]

I am NOT a techiie, but I repair small problems the average user has troublkes with and the last few times I encountered this it was

1) virus-related

2) a defective hard drive

3) bad RAM card


hope this helps,

-Kev



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[Markoman01027]

Sounds like you are either using a 40 conductor IDE cable to the hard drive or the file system is damaged.

Make sure you are using an 80 conductor cable for cable select on the jumper configuration for your hard drive

Make sure the BIOS settings for your hard drive are correct. Check the motherboard manual for propert settings for the hard drive in the BIOS

Put in the XP CD and run a repair and see what happens.

boot into the recovery console, and type in chkdsk /r and that will repair the volume.

Do that before you do a repair installation, because it may solve the problem

if chkdsk /r does not do it, repeat by going into recovery console mode, and instead of typing chkdsk /r type in FIXBOOT

let us know what seemed to work and it if worked out for you

[jankohrasko]

Hi,

The HDD is S-ATA drive, so no jumpers or wrong cables are the problem.

I have booted with Win XP CD, ran CHKDSK /P /R and nothing changed. Next I ran FIXMBR and after that the PC seemed to work. The only problem is that it takes some 10 minutes to start Windows.
So I have tried 2 different antivirus softwares - no viruses found.
When I press ctrl+alt+del the system reports that there are no applications running, but a lot of processes use processor for 98-100 % and that is the reason why it is so slow (my own computer uses processor for some 1 - 3 % when no aplication is running).

The HDD is divided into 3 partitions so I can format C partition and install Windows again, but what if it is a virus problem and the reason is hidden somewhere in D or E partition ?

What do you think of this ?

[jankohrasko]

Hi,

Finally I've found that there is L1 and L2 cache disabled in BIOS and that's the reason why the PC was so slow. Setting the cache to enabled solved the problem.