Unmountable_Boot_Volume
 

My friend's computer displays this message on a blue screen on start up. She left her 4 year old cousin alone in her room with the computer. The OS is XP Home. My friend is not a very organized person so none of the recovery disks or OS disk can be found.

What can I do about this? Would a Windows startup disk be enough to enable me to chkdsk /r ?

Any and all suggestions greatly appreciated.

I would inspect the inside of the computer for physical damage. The only way to really get that kind of message to come up otherwise is to do some things a 4-year old isn't typically able to do.

That does seem like a pretty incredible message for a 4y/o to generate, sure she didn't just delete some files by mistake? :)

Nevertheless, if you have a copy of the OS cd (or somebody else does) you should be able to boot off of it and run system repair. This can result in loss of some of your settings.

I had the same problem, and system repair fixed whatever its was that needed fixing.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=297185

I had this problem...basically it means your hard drive is fucked. Something shorted the drive, and there is damage to the partition. Pretty much all you can do is get a new hard drive and start fresh.

I don't think the hard drive is damaged, try the recovery console. Otherwise the only other option is a reformat and reload. There is a fix in the Microsoft Knowledge Base, but I do not know what it is.

That error does not mean that you have to get a new hard drive. That's a possiblity, but so are some other things, probably more-so than the "shorted drive" idea.

dont just dump it, first boot from the xp cd and try to repair windows if it can detect the drive and fix the problem great if not try sticking it in a second computer and see if you can acces teh HD, if not then format the drive and try to start fresh. lastly toss it

seems like everyone else has answered this already but the hdd is not trashed and there is no damage to the inside of the computer, it may take a while i just had to do thsi for s friend the other day you need a copy of winxp home or pro depending on what ver you have make sure you can boot from cd insert the disk and boot from cd next you want to use the recovery console get to a C;/ prompt and type chkdsk /r /p that should fix your issue