I have a MAxtor Sata Drive that XP was in-stalled, it goes to boot, the Blue screens up ands says unmountable?

Answer 1

Do what Kevin said. The other answer is crap. You only need to run the fixboot command if chkdsk does not work. Here is link to the Microsoft knowledge base article. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/297185

Answer 2

That means the hard drive is completly dead. Dead. dead.

Your only hope to get any data off of it.. and i dont mean that in a way that you will be able to use it again for a long persiod of time, because you wont.. its dead..
is to stick it in the freezer (no joke) for about a day or 2, then hook it up and it may work for 20min or so.
So have some place ready to copy the data too.

Some notes about this.
1.) Make sure you put the hard drive in a zip lock back to prevent condensation.
2.) i wouldnt hook it up directly into the machine. Get an external hard drive case and use that. Something that uses USB would be best.

Good luck

ofcourse you could try to reinstall windows and all the jazz but i work in IT and i dont think ive ever seen a hard drive work after that error.

Answer 3

Boot to the XP disc and when you see the Welcome to setup press the letter R (starts recovery console). You will get a DOS prompt. Type "chkdsk /p" without the quotes and hit enter, type "fixboot" and hit enter, "Y" and enter at the prompt, then type "exit" and hit enter. The system will now reboot into Windows.

If for some reason that doesn't work, try running the Recovery Console. Similar procedure but actually looks for broken files and fixes them.

Answer 4

Unmountable Boot Volume usually means that your hard drive has gone bad. Test it on another computer to see if you can access it there. If you can, try reinstalling Windows. You might be out of luck though.