Volume appears to contain one or more unrecoverable problems

[Spencer]

I have an old pc with Windows XP as an OS on it. Recently it was not able to boot into Windows. So i tried to boot through Safe mode and other options but none of them worked. So I took the Windows XP cd and started the recovery console. I ran the CHKDSK /R and at 40% it hangs and gave me an error message "The Volume Appears To Contain One or More Unrecoverable Problems". Now I am stuck on this forever and dont know what next to do, so can anyone help me out against this? Thank you

[ApPy10]

Do you have another hard drive that is just laying around and you don't really need? If you do have another hard drive, and your XP disk, you could load XP on that, then slave the other drive to it, and maybe be able to do a repair on it.

If it were my computer, I would just go buy a small (20gig or less) hard drive, put XP on it, slave the bad drive to it, try to repair it, and if you get it working, copy your important files over to the small drive. Reformat the drive you have now, and use it as your D: drive for storing your files, programs, and backup on it.

[T.J.]

the problem is the Unmountable Boot Volume error message can be caused by both hardware and software. your hard drive maybe physicly damaged, but usually its a software problem. usually a reinstall of windows takes care of this, unless the disk is going south. The thing that concerns me about the hard drive is that checkdisk freaked out on it. checkdisk stopping is not a good thing.

one option to try is Maxtors hard drive testing utility. it wors on all types of hard drive, saved SCSI drives. PowerMAX will tell you in ~30seconds - 45 minutes ( depending on if the system detects problems in the quick scan )if will tell you whats going on and if it finds a problem it gives you a RMA problem code for maxtor hardd rives ( which you need if you ever have to RMA a maxtor hard drive )

i reccomend the bootable CD ISO image found here:
http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/Ma...downloadID=113

if it comes back that no errors were detected, its pretty much bank on a software corruption issue.

[Hockson]

Could be a bad sector, run CHKDSK /R and the MaxBlast utilities to do a surface scan or you can try Diskeeper Professional, works a treat. (It's really the upgraded version of Windows own native defrag). Have a closer look at the specific error messages that occur when you run chkdsk. eg error messages that precede the aborting. May be entries in event viewer to help at the time you ran chkdsk