Trying to recover from an apparent crash

Preturbed · 09-26-2008, 12:27 AM

So I've been working on my parents computer for a couple days now. It started the other day out of nowhere, they came home and it was just borked. The symptoms:

When booting, the computer would go through the windows loading screen and then BSOD with the error message "Unmountable_Boot_Volume." I looked it up and thought, "Hey, if I had an XP disk I could fix that from the recovery console!"

Haha, their version is OEM. ... ... So I went out and got one from a friend.

Recovery console:
CHKDSK doesn't work. FIXBOOT didn't work. FIXMBR acted like it did. FIXBOOT worked when i tried again. So the boot sector problem seems to have been dealt with.

Attemped to boot from HD again, now I get NTLDR is missing. Press Any Key to restart. Apparently the "Any" key is ONLY Ctrl+Alt+Del. Nice work guys.

Is it bricked? Borked? Where do I go from here? There is/was a ton of pictures and stuff on there that never got backed up so I really want it to be recoverable.

EDIT: ok so now chkdsk works more, in that it gives a report, but it says there are one or more unrecoverable problems.

KnightOfRounds · 09-26-2008, 08:25 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Preturbed

Is it bricked? Borked? Where do I go from here? There is/was a ton of pictures and stuff on there that never got backed up so I really want it to be recoverable.

Sounds like it is pretty much screwed. But I'm not very hardware savvy.

Anyway, if the hard drive itself isn't damaged, you should be able to reformat. But before you do, you can probably find someone who can retrieve all the data. My motherboard totally crapped out on me on my old laptop so I couldn't even get the BIOS to load properly for me to boot from a disk or run any repairs or anything. But the hard drive itself wasn't broke so my friend (an IT guy) retrieved all my data and stored it on an external hard drive for me.

NMR · 09-26-2008, 11:15 AM

You could go get a new computer, or borrow another, and install the hardrive on to it. You can then at your leisure take off everything you need and want before the reformatting.

But yeah, your computer sounds borked.

09-26-2008, 12:27 AM	#1
Preturbed betrayal! Join Date: Feb 2006 Posts: 1,092	Trying to recover from an apparent crash So I've been working on my parents computer for a couple days now. It started the other day out of nowhere, they came home and it was just borked. The symptoms: When booting, the computer would go through the windows loading screen and then BSOD with the error message "Unmountable_Boot_Volume." I looked it up and thought, "Hey, if I had an XP disk I could fix that from the recovery console!" Haha, their version is OEM. ... ... So I went out and got one from a friend. Recovery console: CHKDSK doesn't work. FIXBOOT didn't work. FIXMBR acted like it did. FIXBOOT worked when i tried again. So the boot sector problem seems to have been dealt with. Attemped to boot from HD again, now I get NTLDR is missing. Press Any Key to restart. Apparently the "Any" key is ONLY Ctrl+Alt+Del. Nice work guys. Is it bricked? Borked? Where do I go from here? There is/was a ton of pictures and stuff on there that never got backed up so I really want it to be recoverable. EDIT: ok so now chkdsk works more, in that it gives a report, but it says there are one or more unrecoverable problems. __________________ sudden but inevitable Last edited by Preturbed; 09-26-2008 at 12:31 AM.

09-26-2008, 11:15 AM	#3
NMR Whoa... Join Date: Feb 2007 Location: Ohio Posts: 491	You could go get a new computer, or borrow another, and install the hardrive on to it. You can then at your leisure take off everything you need and want before the reformatting. But yeah, your computer sounds borked. __________________ A mystery to all but and known to a few.