Windows will not boot. umountable_boot_volume

Hi,

I'm trying to help my friend figure out how to fix her computer. When windows tries to boot, it goes to a blue screen which says there is an unmountable_boot_volume. I ran a test that I think tested the hard drive and this is the info it gave me:

Primary SATA
Drive 0:WDC WD1600JD-75HBB0 - Fail Return Code: 7

She is running Windows XP. It will not even boot to safe mode.

Hopefully you can help give us some idea as to how to fix this.

Thanks.

 

Does your friend have a Dell PC by any chance?

I think that error code is a read failure so the HD may have died.

 

Yes. She has a dell computer. If the hard drive is dead will she have to buy a new copy of windows as well as a new hard drive?

 

Also, how would I go about determining if the hard drive is in fact dead.

 

Im not sure if this will work but this only thing i can come up with: Take out the HD and put it into your computer or some one you know, but hook it up as the slave. Boot up, and see if you can access the HD..im not sure if that will work, cuz well im pretty dumb with comps but never know lol.

 

In order to set a drive to slave do I just have to change things on the mother board? Or do I have to make changes in the BIOS as well?

 

BTW, thanks for all the help so far.

 

Unmountable Boot vlome 90% of the time is a corrupt filesystem.

Chkdsk /r from the Recovery Console will ifx it, if thats the case.

 

Could you explain how I access the recovery console? Thanks

 

You'll need an XP CD. Boot off of it. Choose R for recovery console.

Log in, and at the prompt type:

chkdsk /r

 

Anything I can do if I dont have an XP disk? Where can I get one? Sorry for the possibly stupid sounding questions, but I dont know much about this stuff.

 

No, you pretty much need an XP CD to perform the procedure.

 

Hi all,

I have exactly the same problem:

WDC WD1600JD75HBB0 - Fail return code 7 and thenmy hard disk seems to die. When I switch on my PC, I get the message: 'Windows can not be started because following file can not be found or is damaged: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM'.

I put my windows XP disk in CD-ROM, but the PC does not start it up automatically. Anyone have a clue how I can enforce startup by CDROM? I already put CDROM at 1st place (before harddisk) in startup settings.

Thanks!