Member Avatar for bikitybam15

My computer was on in the morning and out of no where a blue screen reading "Unmountable Boot Volume" popped up. I tried rebooting, but the same screen appeared over and over.

I put in my Windows XP Home Edition disk, and I tried repairing it using the steps from the following link:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;555302

When I pressed "R" for repair, I received a message saying that it could not find any hard drive.

I ejected the Windows XP disk and rebooted.

I then came to a screen saying that the Primary Hard Disk could not be found.

I had the option to hit F1 to retry the boot or F2 for setup utility.

Retrying the boot does nothing, and I don't know what to do with F2.

Is my hard drive dead forever?

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by Selwyn
Member Avatar for raybay

Your hard drive is a dead duck. With a lot of luck, you may be able to rescue some of the data using it as a slave in a desktop with a simlar drive and dragging the data across.
But if the power chips or a plate is broken or the coating is peeling, you have the joy of installing a new hard drive. The Seagates are good and have a five year warranty.

Member Avatar for lashmk

Your hard drive may, in fact, be dead. However, it may not. RayBay is correct in suggesting you install your drive in another machine and make an attempt to recover some or all of your data. If you get data, great, if not, before buying a new hard drive try reformatting yours first. If the drive is not physically damaged, reformatting should work.

The problem with your drive is most likely a scrambled file structure and not physical damage to the drive. The error message you received is generally caused by a hardware failure or some kind. Typically a failed stick of memory can cause this error. And ol' XP itself is not immune from causing this kind of damage to the file system.

So, try to recover your data (if your drive is a SATA (serial drive) you'll have to find a machine that can run a serial drive) then try reformatting.

Good luck.

Member Avatar for Selwyn

HELLO
A good peace of software that i use is harddrive regenerator which can be bought in most shops on the internet for about 30 or 40 pounds.
Place the hard drive regenerator disc in the cd dvd drive and boot from the disc and it will repair all your bad sectors on your harddrive and you will still have all your data on the hard drive too.
Here is the website it http://www.downloadatoz.com/hdd-regenerator
Don't bother with the free version as this will only repair the first bad sector , the full version is what you are after.

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