un-mountable_boot_volume

[bob]

What does the above mean? It's written in white with a blue background. Is there anything there can be done about it? I mean to restore XP or if that's not possible - save the data on the HD....

[XPerties]

It's written in white with a blue background[/quote:5f892f6bbf]

When and where do you see this?

-Chris

[Guest LouCypher]

Have you recently been playing around with other operating systems on your HD or used something like fdisk or partition magic?

I think you'd get this error if a disk utility has changed the partition number. The partition number that XP uses to load the kernel is specified in the BOOT.INI file. If you've somehow changed the partition's ID number then when the MBR passes boot to XP on the active partition (which now has a different ID) then the BOOT.INI won't correspond to the correct partition and NTOSKRNL.EXE doesn't get loaded and you get that message.

Am I close? Maybe?

I think if you've got XP installed on a FAT32 partition you can boot under DOS and manually edit the BOOT.INI file and change the partition number back.

Example:

[boot loader]

timeout = 30

default = multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)WINDOWS

[operating systems]

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)WINDOWS = "Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)WINDOWS = "Microsoft Windows XP Professional (verbose)" /fastdetect /sos

[/quote:5ce10aa282]

Where mine says "partition(2)" is the partition ID I boot XP from. Yours may be different, I have a Linux ext2 partition as partition 1 on my system. You change change that number to the right partition number and it might help.

If you installed XP on NTFS then you might have to use something like NTFSPRO or something to boot from a DOS disk and write to the NTFS partition.

[bob]

Xperties: When I try to boot. I get a quick view of the XP logo, and there it is.

LouCypher: I've got XP installed on a NTFS partition. I haven't been playing around with anything like Fdisk or partition magic this time (a couple of months ago, I had to re-install XP because of Partition magic!).

I let a kid play some games on the comp. and when I turned it on after that, it was there. He claims that he didn't do anything, but what can an eight-year-old do anyway? I think I'll try that NTFSpro thing you mentioned. It'll be a big help to me if I can access the HD. Maybe I can copy the data, on the HD, to anther HD then.