Please help, major problem, not sure whats going on. (1 Viewer)

[Benson R]

I would appreciate any help, cause I have never had this problem before.

My system I put together a year ago has been having problems for awhile, many of which I have been ignoring. The first was the onboard LAN stopped working. I had to disable it in the mb bios, and use an old network card I had laying around.

The computer kept getting slower and slower (probably due to an infestation of adware I cant get rid of) so I decided to do a fresh install of win xp.

I bought a new 160 gigh hard drive to expand capacity. Initially I took out the old drive and tried to install win xp on that.

I booted to the cd, win xp install starts up, loads setup files, then when it says loading windows I get blue screen saying unmountable boot volume. Tried again using an xp pro copy I found, same result.

I thought perhaps the probablem was I needed the sp 1 edition to load onto an extra large drive, so I created a blank ntfs partition using the western digital program. Same result trying to load windows setup.

I copied all my files to the new hard drive, then I blanked my older 120 gig drive, and tried to run the install disc on that. Same thing error: unmountable boot volume.

Anyone know what is going on. I thought perhaps the bios of the mb is corrupted. I dont know the model num off hand. It is an Asus board for AMD chips upto 400mhs fsb. I tried resetting the bios to default, and removing the bios battery and putting in back in to no avail.

Any help will be much appreciated.

 

[SethH]

I got a little confused reading your post. Did you get an error when trying to load onto the new HD? If so then it probably is your MB. Go to the Asus website and download the newest version of the BIOS. Follow the instructions very carefully as you can very quickly make your computer unusable if you do things incorrectly. You could also try putting your Windows disk in with the old HD and instead of telling it to install, tell it to do a recovery. This will give you the recovery console where you can run various commands such as chkdsk which checks your HD for errors.

 

[Cees Alons]

Benson,

If the motherboard booted fine before you switched disks, you can assume for now that the BIOS is still OK, unless something peculiar happened while you did the job.

The disk you took out had a jumper placed either for Cable Select (CS) or Master. Make sure you have the new drive set to the same jumper setting (see label on disk).

After you put the new drive in (are both cables properly connected? The IDE cable and the power supply?), boot your computer and enter the BIOS setup menu (something like F1 or F2 during start-up). Does it see the hard disk? Does it recognize it? Is it the master disk on the channel? If not, try to solve it, because this is a necessary requirement!

If (finally )so, go look up the boot sequence in setup. The CD should now preferably be the first one (after the floppy drive), before the hard-disk, so set it that way. Later you can change it back. You could even switch the hard disk off altogether (for booting).

Save your changes and leave the BIOS setup menu. Do a fresh install of XP from the CD, make sure it formats the new drive if that's not done already (e.g. NTFS would be fine). If all goes well and the system wants to start up from the harddisk (probably says: make sure to take out any floppy disc or CD-ROM), first enter setup again and restore the boot sequence to leave the harddisk before the CD (if you want the CD at all).

This should be tried, IMO, before you perform more radical tasks, like upgrading the BIOS firmware, or so.

Good luck,


Cees

 

[Benson R]

The bios recognizes both drives, and I have the jumpers on both set to cable select.

I got a copy of win 2k, and that loaded fine. I then did an upgrade to win xp pro, which is installing now. I still find it very pecular that winxp kept getting that error upon install.

And to clarify what was happening. I connected the new drive completely blank and brand new, and took the old drive out completely. The bios recognized it as the master. I booted to the winxp cd. Setup begins to load, but right when it gets to the part where it asks if you agree to the terms, I got the unmountable boot volume.

I booted to the winxp cd with several other configs of the HDs, but kept getting the same error. I tried a couple different copies of winxp just to be sure.

This really bothers me, so even if I get it up and running with the upgrade from 2000, I may still try upgrading the bios as suggested and trying the fresh install again.

If anyone else has enountered the error though, let me know in what context it was recieved. According to the MS Website it might be an issue with udma controller, though it seems odd when I first put together the computer it wasnt a problem.