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Unmountable Boot Volume

1K views 6 replies 3 participants last post by  dai 
#1 ·
Hi
I have a Compaq SFF D500 and have been trying to upgrade to a 400gb hard drive.

I have changed the boot order in BIOS to boot from cd first.
The genuine XP disk will not boot up on this pc.
Have tried the XP disk on another pc and it boots ok.
Have swapped the cd rom for a known working cd rom but still will not boot.
I DO NOT GET A PROMPT TO BOOT FROM CD.

I have downloaded the 6 startup floppy diskettes from Microsoft.
I have changed the boot order in BIOS to boot from diskette first.
The problem I am getting is that after I have put in the 6th diskette I get the dreaded blue screen with the message Unmountable Boot Volume.

I have tried to start up this Compaq with 4 different hard drives that were all working fine in other pcs but all come back with the same error message. All the hard drives were fully formatted first.

I have absolutely no idea what the problem can be.
If you have any ideas please let me know in laymans terms....i.e. step by step instructions.
 
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#3 ·
Do as Dai has recommended first then if all checks out then you could also try the following steps..... change bios boot order to CD rom first and reinstall the original good harddrive that has xp already on it then put your xp cd back in the drive and see what response you get this time....at power up of the pc it should see the xp cd and direct you to press any key to boot from CD. just wanted you to go thru these steps to be sure it is the harddrive jumper setting as Dai has suggested you check

if it is indeed a bootable version of XP vs. just one for upgrade from win 2000 or some older version of windows it should prompt you to push any button to boot from CD have you used this CD to load xp on a system before at bootup????
 
#4 ·
I have since went and purchased nice new shiny 500gb hard drive, I formatted it and popped it in the pc, tried to boot from the floppies onlt to find Unmountable Boot Volume error message again.
Then swapped over a known data cable and made sure the jumpers are set as on the new hard drives label. Still same message.
Dont know if I'd be able to return this 500gb hard drive now as have put it in the pc now but problem does not seem to be the drive now.
Any more ideas??

PS the genuine xp disk does not boot up and does not show a message boot from cd.
 
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