Solved: BSOD unbootable_boot_volume

[kicktheninja]

When I first boot up my computer it gets about halfway through the windows xp loading screen and then suddenly stops, bluescreens, and gives the error:

"unbootable_boot_volume"

So my first reaction was to get out my windows cd and run chkdsk.

Immediately after running chkdsk it reports:

"The volume appears to contain one or more unrecoverable problems"

The next step I tried was switching to the boot menu from the post screen and choosing "hard drive diagnostics", which said:

Fail. Return code: 7

At this point I am pretty much running out of ideas to try, so I decide to pop in a Ubuntu live disk and see if I can mount the drive there. After about 5 minutes of it trying to mount the drive it failed and said:

"ntfs_attr_pread: ntfs_pread failed: Input/output error. Failed to read NTFS $Bitmap: Input/Output error"

So now I'm at a loss. Is there anything I can do to save the data? There was some pretty important data on there. I don't really care if I have to throw the drive away after this I just want to be able to copy the data onto another hard drive.

I appreciate the help.

 

[Rich-M]

About the only thing left that won't cost much is to try a Zip-lok bag and the freezer for about 4 hours then boot up another pc with this drive as a slave and if you can see it, hurry you have about 1/2 hour.
The other thing you can try may or may not work also is a program called hard Drive Regenerator. You can use a shareware version but you would have to reboot after each sector repair and this program takes a few days to complete on a fair sized drive.
http://www.gold-software.com/download7605.html

 

[kicktheninja]

Well, after a few days of playing around with it, I installed xp on another hard drive, booted it up, and the automatic checkdisk cleaned up the bad sectors.

I just moved everything to a new hard drive just in case the drive is going bad.

 

[Rich-M]

When you get a serious amount of checkdisk repair, time to toss the drive not wait until it is dead all together.