unmountable boot volume

[Coyote]

A friend's Compac Presario 700 was running very slowly so she deleted
some music files. (she swears that's all she dumped, and did nothing
else???) Now the computer won't start up - she gets the blue screen of
death with the message "unmountable boot volume". We've tried booting in
safe mode, f8 and all the options, but we still come back to the above
message. Help!

 

[Jupiter Jones [MVP]]

Power off
Desktop:...Open the case and reseat the hard drive IDE ribbon cable at
both ends.
Laptop:... simply remove and reinsert the hard drive.
If that fails:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=297185
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=315403

Otherwise go to the website of the hard drive manufacturer and
download their hard drive diagnostics.

Do you have a hard drive overlay such as Max Blast?
Windows XP sometimes has issues with overlay software.
You may need to perform a Clean Installation without there overlay
software which is not needed anyway.