HP Pavillion DV9700 - Vista 64bit - "Unmountable Boot Volume"

Hi there,

The problem I have with my DV9700 is it will no longer boot. It was working great, but the other night, I had to do a hard re-boot, and then it failed to start with a blue screen with "Unmountable Boot Volume". This is with the original Vista 64 bit Home Premium version. I chose the option "Self Recovery" but it just finishes up sitting there continually scanning for something?

The hard drive is the original factory installed setup. My question is, how do I get my machine back up and running please? I have a Windows Vista Backup that would run each week to an external 2TB USB drive, but I am guessing that this will not recreate an exact image of my computers state? I would also need to have Vista running to use the backup? Some years ago (2010), I created a complete backup to about 20 DVD's, but I am not sure how to use them as they are for recovery I think?

It looks like I need to buy a new hard drive but how do I go about using the backups I have to install to a new drive? Also, what is the largest hard drive I can use? Should I buy a SSD drive? I wanted at least a 1TB primary drive. Fry's Electronics has a Hybrid drive where the disk cache is solid state making it more affordable. I was thiking of getting one of these?

I would like to use my old original drive as a secondary drive if it is even possible to access its files. I have ordered a SATA caddy so I can mount it into the unused drive bay of the DV9700.

Anyway, I would truly appreciate any help please?

Thank you in advance!