Problem: Unmountable Boot Volume (XP)

seabee

Switched on my laptop this morning, Windows started to load but then a "Blue screen of death" appeared - Unmountable Boot Volume. I have some important files on the laptop that I don't want to lose so instead of running the XP Recovery Console (and possibly losing some files) I ran Ubuntu from a CD (as a way of accessing the HD without being able to run Windows) and when Ubuntu loaded I could view the symbol for the HD but it wouldn't open / mount (I had hoped to copy the data to my external HD).
Any suggestions on how to access my files or will I take a chance and run the XP Recovery Console? Don't want to remove the HD, not too familiar with hardware issues.

IrishTonyO

Try booting from CD and running a hard drive test, you might have something to do this already or do a search or try the following

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

MunsterCycling

That must be an older copy of Ubuntu? 9.04 and 9.10 can defo do what you need, what version did you use?

BTW the Recovery console is the way to fix this, try:

fixboot or fixmbr

You might need to do a check disk on the drive first:
chkdsk /f

See here:
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/chkdsk.mspx?mfr=true

MC

seabee

Thanks for your suggestions. After seeing the error codes that appeared when I ran the system tests I thought the disk was f****d but I ran chkdsk, got windows going and didn't lose any files

@MunsterCycling - I was using 9.04 but can't figure out why it wouldn't work, anyway no harm done.

MunsterCycling

Well get your files the heck off that drive and consider this a warning, you might not be so lucky next time.

RoadKillTs

Your very lucky. That error is usually very bad news. As advised get the data off asap.