hdd problems? (unmountable boot volume)

[animalshack]

k, some of you probably remember me, or maybe not, anyway...im the one that was having problems with his first build because of the video card overheating... no matter what i tried it would overheat and freeze after about 20 minutes of CS (counter-strike)

anyway, after i rebooted from the freezing ti would do one of two things:

beep 3 times and stop then doing this over and over
(if it did this then it wouldnt let me boot up for about 10 minutes, i guess it needed to cool down or something)

or

it would boot to windows and then on the desktop i would get an error message saying that "windows has recovered from a serious error"

well i would just ignore those messages and keep using until about a week ago...when....

i tried to turn on my computer and i only have ONE option...it WILL NOT LOAD WINDOWS to prevent damage to my comp. all it does is goes to a "blue screen of death" and says

"Windows was terminated to prevent damage to your computer for the following reason:
UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME, anyway it says to go to my bios and disable disk caching / etc and i tried but nothing has worked so far..

i was even desperate enough to put my windows disk and try to reinstall windows on my build but now it doesnt even recognize the disc

anyway, if you tihnk you know how i can fix this THEN PLEASE REPLY...im pretty sure its an hdd problem

and lastly, heres my specs:

• PSU: 350 watt Enermax
• Mobo: ECS P4VXASD2+
• Processor: 2.4ghz pentium 4 533mhz FSB
• HDD: Diamondmax Plus 9 series 60gb 2mb buffer
• Optical: 24x HP CD-ROM
• 1 case fan
• Video: GeForce 4 MX 420 64mb AGP 4x
• RAM: 256mb pc100 sd

im thinking of buying a whole new mobo, hdd, vid card, and ram; but if u think u can help me wit this then plz reply soon

sorry for the long a$$ post

[Cricket]

Go over your motherboard and inspect all the capacitor and check for leaking.

Have you tried replacing your RAM?

I don't think the problem is the hard drive. ECS motherboards aren't the highest quality units around and have been known to have quality problems in the past. You might seriously want to consider replacing it with a motherboard that uses a Intel chipset instead of a VIA chipset. And you really should be using DDR memory as the PC100 SDRAM you're using now is really choking the performance of that 2.4GHz P4.

Take a look here.

Cricket

[animalshack]

i checked capacitators and tehy look fine, ill be sure to double-check in a bit

yes i tried replacing the ram, but when i bought the parts i really didnt know much about mobo's other than ecs wasnt expensive, but i guess there was a reason for that

thats why im thinking of tossing it and buying a new moob, ram etc

btw...if this is only a mobo problem amd i going to have to reinstall windows when i get the new motherboard?

and one more question, i knmow this is off topic, but is linux any good for home use, (im also going to be playing counterstrike on it)? i am a webmaster and have been searching for info abuot linux to see if its good enuff to try out, and if it is, which flavor? (i.e. red hat, freebsd, etc)
is it free? easy to install? and uninstall?


thanks for the hlep plz reply soon as i am bored with only one comp lol

thank you mr. cricket man

[animalshack]

yes, no?

[Cricket]

Originally posted by animalshack btw...if this is only a mobo problem amd i going to have to reinstall windows when i get the new motherboard?

What OS are you using? If WinXP, you don't have to re-install it...but you may need to do a repair of current installation.

Originally posted by animalshack and one more question, i knmow this is off topic, but is linux any good for home use, (im also going to be playing counterstrike on it)? i am a webmaster and have been searching for info abuot linux to see if its good enuff to try out, and if it is, which flavor? (i.e. red hat, freebsd, etc) is it free? easy to install? and uninstall?

Linux isn't quite as easy to use as Windows, but it is said to be less prone to crashes and doesn't have as many security issues.

Most distributions are free to download, but the files are huge (some are 600MB in size). As to which one you should try, I haven't tried any yet and can't really make a recommendation(although I do have Mandrake, I haven't installed it yet).

Cricket

[Netguess]

You say it doesnt recognize the cd, did you try going into your bios and making sure the cdrom drive was the 1st boot device? if so try it.