unmountable boot volume**what is that?

[reet]

ok, went ahead and fdisk and formatted the harddrive, I still get a blue screen with " a problem has been detected...UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME"

What is that? how do I fix it? now I have nothing on the computer that is my work computer

[reet]

what the heck is UDMA ??? says I should have a 80 pin cable instead of a 40 pin? AAARRRGGGGH never should have started this

[Cirerrek]

Not sure about the UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME problem as I have never encountered that error, although from your problem description it may be related to cable type.

UltraDMA/UltraATA: Also known as ATA/33, ATA/66, ATA/100, ATA/133, is a technology in newer IDE hard drives that allows for greater overall throughput.

Newer drives with UDMA capabilities can handle greater data througput, but to take advantage of this extra throughput, for ATA/66 and higher you need to have an 80 pin IDE cable instead of a 40 pin IDE cable. You can typically tell the 80 pin IDE cables from the 40 pin IDE cables by looking at the drive connectors at the ends of the cables. The 80 pin IDE cables will have blue connectors while the 40 pin IDE cables will have black connectors. There may be other obvious differences as well but I don't know of any off hand.

If you don't have the proper cable, then you can go into your BIOS and turn the DMA settings off for that particular drive and it should work with a 40 pin IDE cable as most of the IDE controllers are backwards compatible with older standards.

[Venturer]

Reet

I have the same error message appear when i try to load WIN XP.
(UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME) but i don't get any other error messages.
It would be good to find out what this means.

[reet]

FINALLY! I've got the freakin thing going. Ok. the "unmountable_boot_volume" solution is to change the 40 pin cable going from the hardrive to the mother board to an 80 pin. But, to get things going I had to do the following:

had the following setup originally:
1: hardrive and DVD CDrom on one 40 pin cable
2: CDRW and zip drive on second 40 pin cable

Had to change to:

1: 80 pin cable on hardrive to motherboard, nothing else connected
2: 40 pin cable to the CDRW to get things installed.

SO PROBLEM IS:

I have the DVD CDrom and the zip not connected. Can I put 2 cdroms and a zip on the same 40 pin cable? I've heard that you aren't supposed to do that, but the CDrom did not work right on the 80 pin cable with the hardrive.

[akmsr]

@venturer
i'm also using ecs mobo and 1.2g tb. i'm running win2k. i had some configmg error when i installed win2k. but now the system is 'aparently' running ok with automatic reboot with every cold boot no other problem. i was reading posts in an ECS K7S5A forum and found out that a lot of mobo owners were having problems installing OSes and various other problems whenever they were upgading to xp.
somebody figured it out that this mobo causes memory errors and possible data corruption. so i downloaded memtest86 v. 2.8 from www.memtest86.com and sure enough i got 44 errors in one pass. so you could try and see what happens.

[Venturer]

Thanks Akmsr, does this mean if there are faults found that new memory would be needed. Also if the ECS board causes these problems would it be an idea to get a new motherboard as it damages memory?

[akmsr]

even if you get errors, doesn't mean the memory is bad. the same memory could be tested good in other mobo. its this mobo that causes this. somebody figured it out after testing with 29 ecs mobo and 19 different cpu that there are two registor on the mobo that are supposed to be 40 ohm but actually 57 ohm. so if you could solder another one there you could successfully fix the problem he got 100% success fixing it. but my opinion is its not worth it.
first try the memtest86 and see what happens. what bios version, OS, fsb, memory speed are you using?

[Venturer]

I not sure which version BIOS it is but I know it is new as I only purchased the board 3 weeks ago. I am currently running WIN98SE. I also have WIN XP installed on another drive but don't use it because of the error. FSB 266 & memory 133.

[Xayd]

ECS = PcChips, this is what you get with cheap mobos, so consider it a lesson learned I guess .

The boot volume error means it's having trouble reading your hard drive, for whatever reason.

[akmsr]

@venturer
your bios date diplays when you turn your machine on.thats on top of the memory count. if its earlier than 09/11 then you'll get the floppy corruption in win2k and winxp. you have to flash to a later version to get it fixed.
memory speed meaning what mode? spd, safe, normal, fast, ultra.
download the memtest86 and check it out whether you get any errors.
i was having 44 errors in every pass. i was running memory mode ultra. went down to fast 21 errors. went down to normal 0 erros after 5 passes. i'm keeping it there.
you can check memory modes in advanced features of your bios.

[glc]

No, you cannot put 3 devices on one IDE cable.

If you are using 80 wire cables you must jumper the drives to Cable Select, not master/slave. Blue to motherboard, black to master, gray to slave.