Unmountable Boot Disk blue screen

Factual Questions
1

I just bought a cheap computer from Frye’s which comes installed with the Linspire OS. I’m trying to install XP on it.

Linspire boots up fine, so I know the computer works. I restart and put in the XP installation CD and it goes through the driver loading screen. Then the “Windows Starting (or Setting) Up” appears on the bottom of the screen and pauses. After the pause, the blue screen of death pops up with the error “UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_DISK” and installation ceases.

I tried swapping in two hard drives that are formatted for NTFS in XP (from my old computer), just to see if it works, but the same old error occurs.

I checked the Microsoft website, am using the 80-wire 40-pin IDE cables, have BIOS set to fail-safe defaults, to no avail.

Basic specs on the computer: Cempron 2200+, 1 Gig RAM, 40 GB harddrive (have bigger hard drives I’ll swap in as soon as I can get this working), etc…

Now, there’s absolutely no reason I shouldn’t be able to just format over Linux and install XP, is there? This is making no sense to me. I’m no computer expert, but I can’t figure out what’s going on.

Any ideas?

2

Just a quick bump for the folks just getting up…

3

Crap…the error message should be… “UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME”

4

I know it sounds weird, but sometimes OS installs are caused by faulty memory. Is the ram in one chip or two?

5

That is, CRASHED OS installs are caused by faulty memory.

6

2 chips, 1 gig of RAM total. I pulled it from the old computer, where it worked. I might try swapping in the original (measly) 256 megs of ram that came with the computer, but I’m not sure that’ll change anything. When the computer boots up with the gig of Ram, it registers it on the first screen, and Linspire starts okay.

7

Here’s a troubleshooting page from Microsoft Support that sounds like it is up your alley:

“STOP 0x000000ED UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME” Error Message When You Restart Your Computer or Upgrade to Windows XP

8

Thanks, but I’ve already been through that. (“I checked the Microsoft website, am using the 80-wire 40-pin IDE cables, have BIOS set to fail-safe defaults, to no avail.”)

This one’s really puzzling me.

9

Just tried swapping the ram for the original 256MB. No dice. Same error.

10

Update:

Just to add to the knowledge base, the problem in the end turned out to be the DVD-RW I swapped for the generic DVD drive the computer came with. When I swapped it back, the installation proceeded without incident. I then just swapped back the DVD-RW and everything works.

Yay me.