Halp Blew Screen

Rollout

Mothercucker
Apr 8, 2010
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Miami, Florida
Marklar
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Ok so I went to go shutdown my comp last night and reboot today and I got the blue screen saying UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME. Now I know it has something to do with my boot.ini. Can someone help me?
 
Yep. Dead drive.

You could try the freezer trick but your probably best just replacing the drive, then trying to see if you can recover some files from it.
 
If you have data that you absolutely need, send it in to a recovery firm. A reputable one. If there's kiddie porn on it, just break it into pieces and forget about it.
 
I was just running fine too.

Why do so many people say this? "It was just fine yesterday.... derp...."

It was, huh? Well guess what: today is not yesterday, and IT IS NO LONGER RUNNING JUST FINE YOU IGNORAMUS! You ever see tee-vee advertisements for investment funds and they always have the disclaimer in there somewhere about how past performance is no guarantee of future results? Yeah... that applies to more than just investing.

Buy yourself one of these. It's possible that not all of the drive is dead and that you can recover any data you need.
 
If you don't hear any strange noises (like clicking, grinding, drive motor spinning up and down constantly), but hear normal sounds from your harddrive, you can try booting from a Windows install cd, selecting the recovery console, and then typing "chkdsk /r". This will check the current partition/driveletter for issues and (hopefully) fix them. Or at least enough to boot your computer, backup important data, and either reinstall or replace the drive.

If you are hearing clicking sounds, that usually means a mechanical issue with the harddrive. I've heard about people taking their harddrives out of the computer, placing them in a ziplock bag and putting them in a freezer for various lengths of time (avg I keep seeing is 30 minutes). Then quickly take drive out, put back into the computer and boot. Hopefully this will stop the drive clicking long enough to backup your data. If you hear grinding, most likely a head crash inside the drive and it's not worth fixing.

You can also try running the diagnostic cd that all of the major harddrive manufacturers have. Each one has their own diagnosics that you burn to a cd, boot from the cd, and then check your harddrive. It will run various tests on the drive. If it fails the tests, then most likely the drive is going bad.
 
But them computers, they all kinds of high faluttin' with their technologies and stuff. They don't just break out of the blue. Someone must've done something to it when I wasn't lookin'!
 
If you don't hear any strange noises (like clicking, grinding, drive motor spinning up and down constantly), but hear normal sounds from your harddrive, you can try booting from a Windows install cd, selecting the recovery console, and then typing "chkdsk /r". This will check the current partition/driveletter for issues and (hopefully) fix them. Or at least enough to boot your computer, backup important data, and either reinstall or replace the drive.

If you are hearing clicking sounds, that usually means a mechanical issue with the harddrive. I've heard about people taking their harddrives out of the computer, placing them in a ziplock bag and putting them in a freezer for various lengths of time (avg I keep seeing is 30 minutes). Then quickly take drive out, put back into the computer and boot. Hopefully this will stop the drive clicking long enough to backup your data. If you hear grinding, most likely a head crash inside the drive and it's not worth fixing.

You can also try running the diagnostic cd that all of the major harddrive manufacturers have. Each one has their own diagnosics that you burn to a cd, boot from the cd, and then check your harddrive. It will run various tests on the drive. If it fails the tests, then most likely the drive is going bad.

besides the freezer part I've never had any of the other stuff work
 
You could try spinrite to see if it can recover enough bad sectors to boot again.
 
I was working on a Powerpoint for work once, on my nifty $1,700 uber laptop when I got pissed at some trivial thing and smacked the keyboard. That moment of frustration busted my hard drive. Talk about an expensive lesson that totally wasn't worth it. I don't hit laptops anymore.