It was fine on Thursday. On Friday night it froze, spent about 30 seconds writing to the hard drive, then bluescreened saying “KERNEL_STACK_ERROR”. When I rebooted, it immediately told me “operating system not found”.
Frightened, I left it alone overnight, and in the morning it was fine for about four hours, after which it bluescreened with “KERNEL_INPAGE_ERROR”. On rebooting, it again failed to find the operating system. I left it alone for an hour, and then it was fine for about 20 minutes after which it failed with another “KERNEL_INPAGE_ERROR”. Rinse and repeat several more times, as I tried to figure out what in the configurations was causing the trouble.
I eventually concluded that the problem lay elsewhere, so into the BIOS I went. I found nothing of interest there, but as long as I’m fooling around I set a BIOS password, which I’d been meaning to do for a while anyway. Discouraged, I load up Windows XP. I get past the BIOS, the splash screen appears, and then…bluescreen, and “UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME”. Fuck.
Time to reinstall the OS. Obtaining a disc was no trouble, and in the BIOS I told my laptop to boot from CD if it can. It did this without fuss, and brought up a setup screen. Unfortunately my “luck” ended there as none of the options presented there did anything. The OS Repair option just ground the CD-ROM drive for a minute then told me to type “exit” to restart (before doing anything, mind you). My attempts to reinstall the OS were similarly in vain; my one partition is either too full or too corrupt to reinstall into without a complete reformat (which is Not An Option), and my attempts to create a new partition were completely ignored. Praying for a miracle, I try to load again and get “UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME”. I try to load my last known good configuration and “UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME”. I try Safe Mode in all its various permutations and “UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME”.
I give up. Does anyone have an idea that doesn’t start with “reformat the partition…” or “run a magnet over the disk…” or anything like that?
try running chkdsk… i had the same problem last weekend except i wasnt lucky enough to have it working for a few hours at a time. I tried everything i could think of (basically 6 hours of trying), then finally gave up and reformatted. Hope you got better luck than me, but just in case you dont, remember that reformatting always sounds worse than it really is. Most of the stuff you lose can be gained again, or isnt neccesary. Once again, good luck.
Thank you for the link, Q.E.D.; would you believe that I didn’t even think of looking there? :smack: chkdsk /r looks like a good bet. I didn’t realize that System Recovery would accept commands other than ‘exit’ (I tried ‘dir’, but of course that wouldn’t work)
Sometimes when a system doesn’t boot, it’s possible to install the hard drive in another system as a secondary drive, read the contents and copy the important files elsewhere. You might need to change the jumper settings to set the drive as secondary or slave.
Heh. It’s a year and a half old. I doubt you were that desperate
chkdsk got all the way to 63% before deciding that bits of the disk are unrecoverable. Based on the nasty sounds it was making, and the general gestalt of symptoms, I’ve become convinced that something is physically wrong with the disk itself, probably related to and caused by overheating (that would explain why my laptop couldn’t find the OS right away after it had died, but could 10-15 minutes later).
Thank you all for your advice and witticisms. Does anyone know how to safely remove data from a damaged drive? I’m guessing that just popping it into another computer and making it a slave wouldn’t do the trick.
There’s a number of utilities by Norton, McAfee and others for data recovery. Install the drive as a slave or secondary master in a PC using a 2.5" to 3.5" drive cable adaptor. When shopping around for data recovery utilities, remember you get what you pay for. If the data is VERY valuable, there are companies you can send it to who can extract data in nearly all cases short of a hard head crash. But they charge a small fortune for this kind of service.
