mollypsu

Hi,
I have come head to head with the dreaded blue screen with the following error messages:

UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME

Technical Information:
STOP: 0x000000ED (0x86B55368, 0xC0000006, 0x00000000, 0x00000000)

Computer Information:
Dell Inspiron 710m
Purchased 2 yrs ago
windows XP

I know that Dell will replace the hard drive, which is still under warrenty, however I need to retrieve the information on the computer

Is there anything that I can try that will recover the information??

-Sad PhD Student.

Deleted090308

Welcome to TSF.

To recover files from the drive you will have to take it out of the laptop and connect it to another computer using an adapter.

But, it could be as simple as a bad connection. Try taking the HDD out - then put it back.

wiseleo

Hi Molly,

Please follow my steps to safely recover your drive. If you do not have another computer, the easiest way would be to hook up an external disk, boot from the CD I referenced and simply copy the C:\Documents and Settings folder to that external disk.

I can give you exact commands for that.

claycad

Your HDD might be fine, it may just be a file system or boot problem that can be fixed without replacing the HDD. My friend had the same problem. I used this method, his has been booting fine ever since (several months now)

1. Start your computer by using the Windows startup disks, or with the Windows installation disk if your computer can start from the CD drive.
2. When the Welcome to Setup screen appears, press R to select the repair option.
3. If you have a dual-boot or multiple-boot computer, select the Windows installation that you want to access from the Recovery Console.
4. Type the administrator password when you are prompted to do this.

Note If no administrator password exists, press ENTER.
5. At the command prompt, on the drive where Windows is installed, type chkdsk /r, and then press ENTER.
6. At the command prompt, type exit, and then press ENTER to restart your computer.
If this procedure does not work, repeat it and use the fixboot command in step 5 instead of the chkdsk /r command.

If that wouldn't work, You may be able to get an external enclosure to hook it to another PC like the others said.

mollypsu

Thank you for your helpful responses.

I will try the method claycad has suggested this evening....

I do however have another computer that I could use to try to retrieve the information. WiseLeo, would you mind sending me the specific instructions on how to do that? I am not fluent in the computer language, so the simpler, the most appreciated.

Thank you so much for your help!!

Molly

wiseleo

Mollypsu - be advised that if the condition of your drive is physically not OK, you may lose data by running CHKDSK and have no way to undo the damage.

My method is described in my signature. It would allow you to safely experiment with various data recovery tools without risk of data loss.

Removing a Dell laptop HDD is easy. You will need a relatively good screwdriver to unscrew its tray screws after you remove it if you wish to mount it in an external enclosure. If I recall, they are either #0 or #1 Philips. Stripping the heads of those screws with a wrong screwdriver is a major pain. Jeweler's screwdrivers won't have enough torque.

I wrote an article on this on one of my websites at http://www.slowlap.com

Deleted090308

The 0x000000ED error is almost always caused by a bad connection or errors in the file system.

Copy any data important to you to another hard drive.

Then run chkdsk /r:
Start the computer with the Windows CD.
At the Welcome to Setup screen, press R to select the repair option.
You will have to enter the Administrator password - if none, just press <Enter>.
In the recovery console - type chkdsk c: /r > press <Enter>.
When the disk check is done:
Type Exit > press <Enter>.
Take the Windows disc out and reboot.

claycad

the only problem with wiseleo's method is you need extra hardware. You either need an empty partition on another harddrive big enough to clone your old one or you need an external enclosure/adaptor to put your old harddrive in so you can hook it up to another PC. Here an example:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2010090092+1053807124&name=2.5%22

I find it really handy to have external enclosures around for such an event. They aren't too expensive and can really come in handy for data recovery...of course the best way is to always backup you data to another harddrive if you can afford to buy one.

I've never heard that running chkdsk on a bad harddrive will ruin it. Anytime I've ever ran it on a disk with I/O errors I lost a minimal amount of data that was already on a bad sector to begin with and was able to recover the rest. I've never had anything buy good luck with chkdsk, but maybe I've just been lucky. If your harddrive is bad chkdsk tests the sectors and blocks them off so the harddrive can't write or read anymore data on the bad sectors. You will absolutely lose the data that is written on the bad sectors, but if the sector is bad, it's probably lost anyway. But eitherway its always good to backup your data before running any utilities if possible.

wiseleo, can you give me a link to an article are anything about running chkdsk on a bad drive, i'd like to try to learn more about why that happens, thanks.

Deleted090308

Chkdsk can't ruin a HDD, but files deemed corrupted by chkdsk can be very hard, or impossible, to recover.

wiseleo

Chkdsk can make recoverable data unrecoverable.

Our priority in data recovery situations is to first get the data off the system and then consider whether it can be made bootable again. What I usually do is grab an image, clone the disk, run chkdsk on the cloned disk. If there is corruption, I replace the C:\Documents and Settings with the folder from my image pre-chkdsk.

I can indulge in CHKDSK experiments at my leisure on several HDD images with a corrupt file system. It is absolutely safe for me to do that on a copy of the data. In fact, I have done it. I have one of my customers' recent drive images still in my temporary storage array. She lost about 5000 pictures. All of her files were perfectly safe except for the My Pictures folder. The disk took about 12 hours to image with 35 errors. We found all of those pictures with an advanced scan of the image with Active@ Undelete. I then ran a CHKDSK against the disk image after mounting it using vdk, which is a way to create virtual disks from images. We recovered a lot fewer pictures using the same process. Many of the recovered files were in fact corrupt. Whereas I was able to recover pictures with original file names and folder structure from the pre-chkdsk image, after the process ran, I found some of those pictures in .CHK files.

That is why people post problems asking us to help them play back corrupt music files or reconstruct pictures. CHKDSK discards data that it believes is useless.

Attempting to run it on a failing hard disk is simply playing Russian Roulette. In most cases you'll be fine, but CHKDSK is not programmed to give up or trigger an ATA reset like ddrescue is, it's programmed to attempt to repair the file system, even if that corrupts the file. If its repair kills the drive, which does happen, then bad things will happen. If CHKDSK runs with a faulty controller, it will get confused. In an extreme example, non-faulty files will get divided into 32KB-sized clusters of data.

I'll give you a practical example - a client brought me a disk. It was still spinning up. I attempted to grab an image from it. About 1% into the process, the drive started clicking and required a physical recovery.

If that were a CHKDSK, the data would have been irreparably damaged. In this case, we simply rebuilt the drive and got the data off it without any further incident.

The only problem was that the price for recovery went up... a lot.

As far as my extra hardware requirement, it can be used as a backup drive after the recovery is complete.

Why would you run a process that is irreversible and is known to discard data it doesn't understand. That's what CHKDSK /R or /F is. :)

I'll see if I can find some more 3rd party evidence, but my experience tells me to stay far away from CHKDSK unless I am working with a copy.

claycad

wiseleo, thanks for explaining, that makes sense now. So the best way to recover data would be to clone the HDD then use an undelete program to retrieve the files?

Is there a program similar to chkdsk that will look for what it thinks is corrupted data but won't actually attempt to fix it, it would just tell you the file names and locations on the disk?

thanks for the info.

Deleted090308

The file system IS corrupt - that's what the error message means.

I fixed a similar problem today with chkdsk /r. If you run chkdsk /p instead of chkdsk /r it will scan the drive for errors, but not change anything - it's purely diagnostic.

Chkdsk /p will report file system errors (guaranteed). To be safe - clone the drive, then run chkdsk /r to correct the errors

wiseleo

Data recovery software will see the corrupt file system without running CHKDSK, whereas Windows will complain. There are many tools. My favorite so far is Active@ Undelete. There are others. Some are free, some are not. You want a tool that can work with a disk image.

The point is to make a copy of the disk and then work with that copy. :)

CHKDSK /P is not purely diagnostic. The /P tells chkdsk to run anyway if the disk is not flagged as requiring the check.

While CHKDSK with no switches or with a /P (from Recovery Console) is supposed to be purely diagnostic, that is actually not the case in reality. I don't quite remember what it does, but I can certainly run some experiments when I get some time. In either case, running it without fixing files is simply pointless and simply contributes to drive stress, and running it to fix files is not advisable. That renders this whole discussion moot, does it not?

Deleted090308

Incorrect, wiseleo.
http://techrepublic.com.com/5208-623...sageID=1944962

wiseleo

OK, here is what I will do tonight...

Get a checksum of a known corrupt disk image. I have lots of those.
Run CHKDSK on a known corrupt disk image. No switches.
Run the checksum on the same image after CHKDSK ran on it with no switches.

We'll see if that changes anything.

dai

i have never known chkdsk to cause problems or the use of the switches
why do you think ms supplies them
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/pro....mspx?mfr=true