My PC tries to boot but a blue screen comes up with the message "Unmountable_Boot_Volume". I followed the directions to do an F8 and open in safe mode but it keeps coming back to the same error screen. I tried starting it using all the other options when you do an F8 but that hasn't worked either. My wife noticed the fans were making a lot of noise when she shut down the last time before the error message started showing up. We just had a wireless internet connection put on it a couple of weeks before we started having this problem. It would work for a day or so and then it'd have to be uninstalled and reinstalled again to get it to work. We must have uninstalled and reinstalled the wireless setup 5 or 6 times before this problem started. I unplugged everything to the PC but the monitor, and keyboard but that didn't help. I can't get past the error message. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Its an HP PC running xp. Thanks.

The message indicates that the hard drive is not being read. Could be a bad hard drive or a bad drive controller.

How old is the PC?

It definitely sounds like a hardware issue. It could very well be the controller or the disk itself. I would recommend finding out the manufacturer of the drive. You can do this by either looking in the documentation that came with your PC, going online to get your PC specs at the manufacturers website (assuming your PC came from one of the major manufacturers), or opening up the PC and looking at the label on the hard disk itself (if you're comfortable with that). Document as much of the information about the disk including the manufacturer (i.e. Hitachi, Seagate, etc.), as well as the model number and serial number if available. Then, you can go to the manufacturers website as most have diagnostic utilities that will be able to tell you if there are any errors with drive, or if it cannot read it, that there are issues with the controller.

If all of this sounds like too much work, just bring it into a Best Buy or your local PC repair shop and have them take a look at it. They will be able to tell you what the problem is and most likely have the tools necessary to recover data from the drive if it is a disk failure. One other thing to keep in mind is that you mentioned that your fans were running loud, this could have also been your hard disk spinning and starting to fail. So if you aren't comfortable with doing a lot of this stuff yourself, I would recommend letting someone take a look at it. Shouldn't cost more than $30 to get them to tell what the issue is.

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Originally Posted by ScottGem

The message indicates that the hard drive is not being read. Could be a bad hard drive or a bad drive controller.

How old is the PC?

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Thank you for responding so quickly. The PC is about 8 years old. I think I'm going take it to Best Buy to have it checked out. Thanks again.

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Originally Posted by steve09

Thank you for responding so quickly. The pc is about 8 years old. I think I'm going take it to Best Buy to have it checked out. Thanks again.

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DOH!! Don't go there, you got all the Black Tie expertise you need here!

Since you're still online, I'd check into some disk utilities that you can burn to disk, like Hard drive Regenerator or Drive Fitness, or Spinrite6. Any one of these can run tests against your hard drive to verify integrity. To verify if it's a hard drive controller, take the drive out and put it in an external case and see if you can access the drive. IF it is your hard drive controller, you can always pick up a hard drive controller card and stick it in the computer with little to no problems.

Frankly, with an 8 yr old computer I would not put ANY money into it. If Best Buy will require any money to just check it don't bother.

A computer that old is not worth saving. If the hard drive is not fried, you can put it into another computer and try to get your data off it. If its fried, then just throw the PC out.

Time to buy a cheap new PC. I mean hard drives are not very expensive, but good luck finding anything other that that and maybe some replacement expansion cards. All the hardware standards and connections have changed and hardly anything from even 5-6 years ago is available. If it is, its very expensive.

You could pick up a BASIC PC for $300-$400. If you want something that performs well and will be good to go for a while I would spend in the neighborhood of $600-$700, but no more.

The average life span for most PC's and PC parts (especially the HDD) is about 5-6 years. Of course there are always exceptions.

I would suggest HP or Compaq over Dell or anyone else. I've heard good things about Sony's newer PCs, but they are really expensive and you're paying for the name.

This problem comes when the windows files corrupted then, while restarting computer display this error. So, insert the bootable cd of your operating system, then repair the windows files.
Follow the Microsoft article further steps.
When you restart your computer or upgrade to Windows XP, you receive the "STOP 0x000000ED UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME" error message

Repair the OS with a Bootable OS CD