UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME

[Guest]

I'm getting a blue screen of my laptop (with only one drive, C with the
errors below. Basically the system boots into XP showing the logo page for a
few seconds before the blue screen comes up:
....
UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME
....
Technical information:
*** STOP: 0x000000ED (0x863C2B40, 0xC0000015, 0x00000000, 0x00000000)

I tried the recovery console with "chkdsk /f", which stopped at 25%.
"fixboot" and "fixmbr" both reported that there is an "unrecoverable error".
When I tried to
do a simple "dir", the error message is "unable to enumerate directory
structure".

When I tried a 3rd party tool such as "Active@ NTFS Partition Recovery", it
was able to see the directory structure. My guess is that there are new bad
sectors landed in the MBR/partition table area and recovery console simply
could not write the backup copy to their original place. I'm thinking about
getting the image on the broken drive onto a new HDD with the same physical
spec and try chkdsk/fixboot/fixmbr again

Any comments or suggestions are appreciated.

 

[Jupiter Jones [MVP]]

Power off
Desktop:...Open the case and reseat the hard drive IDE ribbon cable at both
ends.
Laptop/Portables:... 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 their overlay software
which is not needed anyway.