Unmountable_Boot_Volume

[Chazwurth]

Hi everyone. I have my Dad's computer here and it is having problems. It is a Sony Vaio PCV-RX650 P4 machine with Windows XP Home Edition. Upon boot up it posts and gets to the Windows screen but then gets a quick blue screen (that I captured on video and went through frame by frame to figure out what it said) and then sits at the "windows shut down improperly" or whatever and asks how you want to restart: Safe Mode, Last known good, etc. None of these work and it just returns back to this screen after it tries to run windows and flashes a quick blue screen!

From what I have read on here it sounds like a bad boot sector or MBR. I DO NOT have a Windows XP CD available right now to run the Chkdsk /r or fixboot. I tried to run the Maxtor Diagnostic utility to see if the drive is bad but it won't boot from the Seatools floppy disk that I made on my other computer. I set the computer to boot from the floppy drive first and disabled the other drives. The computer reads the floppy and then says to insert a "System Boot Disk". Seatools is supposed to be a boot disk I thought.

I also had the computer come up with the error message "Primary Master Drive Fails" and not even get to the Windows screen. This happened a couple of times, I hit reset and then I got the Blue screen listed above.

Any ideas? Bad sector on the hard drive? Bad MBR? Virus?

[Chazwurth]

I am locating a copy of XP so that I can run chkdsk /r and then fixboot if that doesn't work. Any other thoughts? I am a little concerned that the seatools program would not work as a system disk as I thought it contained its own OS.

[shadowpr]

Instead of making a floppy, have you tried making a seatools cd? That has worked for me.

Try that.

Also, can you get into bios? Is the hard drive recognized?

[Chazwurth]

I will try and make a cd tonight. I have no problem getting into BIOS and yes the hard drive is recognized. I will update later tonight or tomorrow a.m.

[Chazwurth]

I ended up borrowing a copy of Windows XP before I had a chance to make a cd of the seatools diagnostic program. I booted up the computer with the Windows XP cd and ran the recovery console. I did the chkdsk /r and it fixed several bad portions of Windows. Computer seems to be fine now! Found out my Dad's Norton anti-virus is not active and has not been since mid 2007. I told him to get the new version of Norton (since he likes it) and run it before making any backups of important files on his computer (since he never has). Thanks everyone for your help!!