Unmountable Boot Vol - tried (almost?) everything

Hi there. I've read previous threads on this but not got my answer. Last night my keyboard started typing in alphabetic order rather than keys I pressed. I have Dell Dimension 5150. Thinking I'd got a virus I shut down immediately via power button. This morn, got the blue screen 'unmountable boot volume'. Went online for help. The standard suggestion didn't work. Kept coming back to blue screen. Tried various things and at some point pressed Y to create new partition. I'm not a techie at all so shamefully had no idea whether I was doing right thing. Pressed F12 to boot from Window XP Prof CD. Tried again. Then did chkdsk /r. First time I did this it took 30mins, pressed 'fix reboot' but got blue screen again after reboot. Tried second time with chkdsk /r because I'd seen somewhere to follow it with chkdsk /p and then do 'fix reboot'. But I haven't been able to get to chkdsk /p stage yet. For the past six hours chkdsk /r has been' performing additional checking or recovery' and has only got to 10% completed. It hasn't frozen, it's just that each % is taking forever. At this rate it'll be 24hrs before it's complete and even then I think I'll just get the blue screen again. Should I abort and start again? Your advice is very much appreciated. Thanks.

 

Malware could have deleted the boot sector but this but it's rare, you also now can't run check disk which usually means there are so many unreadable bad sectors on the drive it never finishes, the problem that fits both these symptoms is a hard drive failure.

So I would remove the hard drive from the computer and connect to a fully working computer as a secondary drive then run the hard drive manufacturers tools on it to test it's integrity, this eliminates both problems with the original computer and your windows disk.

If the drive passes the test's and is functional run check disk then format the hard drive while in this secondary windows environment, reinstall in the dell and try to install windows again.

If this doesn't work run a low level format using your manufacturers tools listed in this link

http://www.ariolic.com/activesmart/low-level-format.html

 

Thanks very much Ricky. I appreciate your help. In the end it seemed a bit too technical for me so I took it to repairshop who said the hd was kaput. I'm now trying to get stuff back on new hd. Getting my oe mail account back is proving difficult at the mo :confused