unmountable boot volume
 

Jesus has risen yet my netbook won't. Can you help?

On startup I get the blue screen and "unmountable boot volume"; STOP: 0x000000ED on my 1.5 year old dell netbook. Windows XP, I think Home, the latest service pack. Google search says to run the recovery cd and that might fix it. I don't have an official windows recovery cd (only a emachines recovery from my old desktop), not that it'd matter because this netbook doesn't have a CD drive, only a few usb ports and a universal card reader. I copied the emachines cd onto a brandynew SD card, that didn't work (BIOS changed to boot off "removable device"), I'm now copying it to an old chinese MP3 player cause I don't have a real USB flashdrive here. (after changing BIOS to boot off "USB Drive") I'm thinking this old mp3/USB drive isn't fast enough cause it's taking a hour to copy the shit over to it where the SD card was maybe 5 minutes.

I was attempting to post on this site with a picture of a corsa muffler (that resonance muffler thing thread) when windows security said I had a virus and started doing all sorts of stuff. I canceled out of everything but the windows security stuff wouldn't close and it started to download updates to visual basic 2005 or some shit so I held down my power button until it shut off. Oops?

Anyway, is there something easy I can try before I give it to my computer fixit friend? He lives quite far away and I won't be able to get it back for a while. His plan is to yank whatever harddrive is in there, attach it to his computer and fix it that way with his gadgets.

Thoughts?

Try to boot in safe mode?

Merely copying a Windows CD to a usb drive won't be sufficient, you need to prepare the USB drive for booting and give the BIOS a location to boot from.

Here's a THG (Ugh...) on the topic: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...cket,1113.html

Microsoft's technical explanation: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/297185

As I am unaware what comes with the eMachines recovery CD, I would highly recommend you don't use it. Likely, it just formats the hard drive and reinstalls Windows (Not good!)

Just torrent a copy of Windows, follow the THG's steps for booting, follow Microsoft's guide from there to repair.

If you can get your hands on a dell recovery CD they are (atleast in xp) a bare copy of windows


When does the error appear? Do you have a chance to select the recover console? If so try running the following commands in order

Chkdsk /p
Fixboot

Being a netbook I'm suspecting its a cheapy hardrive that just slowly filled with disk errors.

If that fails there is always the option of purchasing a usb cd rom.

I'm going to assume for the moment that getting the data off of the machine is important.

One way to do this, assuming the partition isn't seriously damaged, is to boot the machine into Linux. Many (most?) Linux distributions these days come with the ability to mount and read Windows-formatted (NTFS / FAT) filesystems natively. I have, in fact, used this method to recover data from two machines that were permanently bluescreened before rebuilding them. Much easier than pulling the drive and mounting it in a different machine.

Normally, doing this requires a CD-ROM drive, however it is possible, with a couple of extra steps, to install and boot Linux from a USB thumbdrive. I haven't personally done this, but here's a decent-looking tutorial: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/linux...-the-easy-way/

If you are new to Linux, I recommend grabbing the Ubuntu distribution which is referenced in that article. Ubuntu is a very friendly, easy-to-use Linux distribution for first-timers.

After getting the machine running in Ubuntu, you should be able to see your hard drive under Places -> Computer.


I wouldn't recommend trying to use your MP3 player as a USB drive for this purpose. It'll likely be rendered unusable.

You can also install XP directly from a USB flash drive. I've never done this either, but many tutorials and utilities exist:

http://komku.blogspot.com/2008/11/in...lash-disk.html

http://www.techtipsgeek.com/install-...pen-drive/559/

http://myeeeguides.wordpress.com/200...b-flash-drive/


Note that this method will simply wipe the drive clean, and not allow you an opportunity to recover any data that might still be there. If the data is important, do the Linux trick first.

Recognizing that one of the challenges you face is the lack of a Windows XP disc, are you familiar with bittorrent?

Without admitting to any specific violations of the DMCA, I'll just say that downloading an ISO image of WinXP, complete with keygen and cracks, would appear to be possible.

http://www.ntfs.com/boot-disk.htm
download free copy of windows boot cd and use it to chkdsk hdd

This works, I've booted by laptop from a USB several times, the difference is, I've done it onto a new hard drive instead of onto a partition. I use Ubuntu 10.10, there are many types of Linux, but like Joe said, Ubuntu is the most user friendly, I find it to be faster then any Microsoft OS, and it seems to annoy me far less.

I used an 8 gig USB drive and a bootable form of Ubuntu, although I don't know which one, but the link that Joe put up looks familiar. I want to say that you only need a 2 gig storage device, but that may be wrong, just go get a new USB drive for >$10 instead of using the MP3 player.

OR

If you don't want to go with Linux (you should, you really wont regret it), then have you tried a system restore? Maybe in "Safe Mode". I would have shut the fucker down mid-download too btw.

OR OR

If you need a computer now, but want the info that is on the current drive, you could try getting a new hard drive, installing it (very easy, dont be skerred), sending the old drive to you friend and getting the stuff back from him when he's done. One that's all done, if your old hard drive is usable you could make it into an external hard drive using an external hard drive case kit thingie. Hell, you could dual-boot Windows and Ubuntu and be uber-cool like me. :eek3dance

Use unnetbootin http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ to prepare a SD card or USB flash drive for an Ubuntu ISO. Then you can boot your machine and copy/backup your files, as it can read/write NTFS. Whether you decide to seek out an XP disk or just install Ubuntu at that point is up to you.

Put it in the box with my turbo goodies and I will fix it.

Thank you all for the suggestions. I get the blue screen regardless of the boot up procedure (safemode, previous known good settings, normal, etc). Nothing is that important on it but I have my subaru ecu hacking software on it (romraider, ecuflash, etc) and it worked with my cheap-o ebay cable, plus my OEM rom is on there too. Again, not horrible if I need to just start over with a new drive/clean format/whatever but ideally I'll spend some time trying not to go that route yet.

I'll sleep on it and get my USB drive from work, and also try to get a windows XP disc from work too, they probably have one. Thanks again everyone!

It's funny that you mention that.

When my desktop PC at work perma-bluescreened a couple of months ago, I ran it in Ubuntu (booted off of a LiveCD) for a full week before the IT department could get somebody out to our office to rebuild it. Even running off of a CD, I was really impressed by how fast and responsive the machine was.

I came this close |___| to just saying "fuck it", cancelling the service ticket, and rebuilding the machine as Ubuntu-native. Only one thing stopped me.

OpenOffice.

I do a shitload of work in MS Excel. Now, I don't claim to be a VBA guru, though I do use some of the more advanced features of the application. Nothing fancy, but I can type concatenate statements with nested IFs seventeen layers deep with my eyes closed without missing a single close-paren.

OpenOffice supplies most (all?) of the same functionality, but it's all very slightly different. I felt like a Brazilian radio DJ who suddenly finds himself living in Portugal. Semicolons where commas 'should" be. Icons in different places in context-sensitive dropdown menus. That kind of thing.

I just couldn't make the transition. Old dogs, new tricks, something like that. Made me realize that I'm at an age where I've sort of gone over-the-hump, at least from an IT timescale.

Theres a program called WINE that lets you use windows programs on a Ubuntu machine, I tried to run iTunes on Ubuntu through WINE and I couldn't get it to work, I think because my laptop is 64 bit, which caused problems. If your computer is 32 bit, I think it would have a better chance of working.

Fuck that. Run VMWare workstation and windows as a VM image. Much much easier.

I've seriously contemplated it, particularly now that I've had a chance to play with Unity.

Look into crossover office, it is WINE, but a lot more effort has been put into making business type apps work. I have used Office in the past with it and it worked fine.

Thanks, I'll try that

Do it. Once you get flash player successfully working (30 minutes) you'll be set. If you still want windows on your computer, duel-boot. You'll never use windows though;)

From the Ubuntu wiki:
Ubuntu can also run many programs designed for Microsoft Windows (such as Microsoft Office), through Wine or using a Virtual Machine (such as VMware Workstation or VirtualBox)

Well, I do still have to run Windows to some extent.

IS won't tell any of us mere mortals the domain password, so in order to access Outlook, I'll need to capture my current desktop build and run it as a VM.

That being the case, I might as well run Excel through the VM (in Unity). I couldn't give a shit about the rest of Office, but I've got more than a decade's worth of tools built in Excel that I'm not exactly willing to part ways with, and to be brutally honest, OpenOfficeCalc just isn't quite up to par.