The first thing I've had trouble mounting

ERage

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Nov 7, 2005
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I have a PC in this office that keeps exhibiting weird behavior. Every few months it seems to lock up (while it was just running idle) and it will not wake up or warm boot. Upon giving it a cold boot the hard way it progresses to the windows blue screen stating "Unmountable Boot Volume"

What could consistently cause this in a machine? I have checked the disk for bad sectors multiple times and it comes back fine so I don't think the harddrive is having any trouble. Also, it seems the only thing that will fix the problem is a full reformat and clean install. Luckily this is not a critical machine and all it really does is run a presentation monitor and some basic software applications but no data is stored on it.

I'm at a loss, anyone know what might cause this recurring problem every 5-7 months?
 
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some people are saying it's a problem with the master boot record. Fixing it i can do, but what i really need to know is what could be causing this so many times in the same machine and now I might prevent it in the future. It always seems to be happening near a time where we have a big power outage... but it has a UPS that shuts it down prior to battery running dry so I can't imagine that would be causing it. I'm not sure what to even check.
 
I've followed the steps outlined in this link:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;555302

none of which were effective. I am going to have to agree with you, I believe the board might be going bad.

On a side note, check out the ebonics in the microsoft fix page I linked above

M$ said:
RESOLUTION
If it be the connector cable problem then replace the 40-wire cable with an 80-wire UDMA cable.
 
why_ask_why said:
yeah, board or it could be as simple as a bad drive cable

not a bad idea, I'll swap it out for the hell of it, it's not like I don't have 100 of them laying around anyways.
 
go to the drive's manufacture's site and run their drive diagnosis software on it. Also while its running check to see if its running hot. Last year I killed a 160 by not having a fan blowing on it. It did the same except it would crap out after a reboot. a chkdsk would fix it. I finally got around to checking the drive and getting stuff off of it litterally a day before it finally gave up the ghost.
 
have you tried a different power supply. There maybe some weird voltage drop when it boots up, causing it to corrupt the data on the drive after a while. Put the drive in a different machine and see how it works. If it is SATA, try putting it on a different channel. If it is IDE, try putting it on a cable by itself using cable select. I'm betting that it is the power supply though.
 
SpangeMonkee said:
have you tried a different power supply. There maybe some weird voltage drop when it boots up, causing it to corrupt the data on the drive after a while. Put the drive in a different machine and see how it works. If it is SATA, try putting it on a different channel. If it is IDE, try putting it on a cable by itself using cable select. I'm betting that it is the power supply though.

It's SATA, tomorrow morning it will be on a new wire in channel 1 instead of 0. Given your suggestions, I'm now bringing my nerd gear to check the voltage on the PSU to see if it is doing any weird fluctuations.
 
ERage said:
It's SATA, tomorrow morning it will be on a new wire in channel 1 instead of 0. Given your suggestions, I'm now bringing my nerd gear to check the voltage on the PSU to see if it is doing any weird fluctuations.


Is it a Dell machine? If it is, they have a weird BIOS setup for dealing with SATA and IDE. Basically, if you do have a Dell, go in to BIOS and under the HD device setup there are settings for SATA Only, IDE Only & Compatibility Mode (or Combo Mode). This stupid ass setting has cause me a number of problems with HDs & CDROMs. Never seems to work the same. Set it to SATA only and let windows figure out the IDE CDROM.