I'm a relative noob to all this, but I've done some reading and am sure that I can sort it myself with a little help which will be very much appreciated.
Windows XP Home (SP2)
AMD Athlon 1800+ (1533 Mhz)
Abit KD7 B/S Motherboard
VIA VT8377 Apollo KT400 Chipset
Seagate Barracuda ATA IV Hard Drive
I also have a full Everest report (if needed) which was done a week or two before the malfunction occurred. (Not sure how to post it though)
A few weeks ago I fired up my old PC (4 years old, though hardly ever used) and everything was hunky dory. Then after a couple of weeks things went wrong.
Everything booted up normally until a few seconds in to the black screen with the windows logo. Then a blue screen message would pop up for about a millisecond and then the machine would start to reboot from scratch. I could only read the message by filming it! It was the dreaded "Unmountable_Boot_Volume" error.
All subsequent boot attempts were the same except for the black screen that asks how you would like to start windows (safe, last good configuration, normal) but no matter which option I selected the results were the same as before.
So, I did a bit of research and checked the HD had the correct leads (it did) and found out that I may have to repair/reinstall windows. The only problem is that I don't have a windows disk, as it came preinstalled on the machine. However, I do have a recovery disk for my other PC, although that runs XP Media Edition and I'm not sure if I can use that disk to repair/reinstall windows in my old Home Edition PC?
Since then things have gone from bad to worse. Now on booting I get a black screen with the message "DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER" at the bottom. To make matters worse the HD has disappeared from the boot list. I tried the "IDE HDD Auto-Detection" in the BIOS but it's still not detecting it.
Can someone please help? Many thanks in advance
