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BSOD Error - Unmountable Boot Volume
I’m hoping someone can help me find a way to repair the hard drive for my wife’s <one-year-old HP Pavilion dm1 laptop so we can recover her data… at this point in time the partition on the drive is inaccessible (to me at least).
Here’s a brief rundown of the scenario. On Saturday morning my wife woke me up to tell me her laptop had blue-screened while she was working on an online document, and would no longer boot into Windows.
When the system is powered-up it seems to be going through a normal start-up process… displaying the Win7 pulsing logo for a minute or so. Then is switches to a notice asking if the user wants to run start-up repair (recommended) or start Windows normally. If start-up repair is selected the system will eventually display the default Win7 desktop wallpaper, and the hard drive light will indicate activity for a couple of minutes…. There’s even a mouse pointer that can be moved around… but no dialogs, controls, or anything else will ever appear. We left it in this state for more than 30 minutes to make sure.
If ‘start Windows normally’ is chosen the system will eventually blue-screen , with the error reported as ‘Unmountable Boot Volume’.
I tried pulling the drive and dropping it into an external drive bay, but when I attempted to go into the main partition I received a notice that the drive needed to be formatted first (which I obviously didn’t do).
I’ve also tried booting into a Win7 installation disk via an external USB drive (the laptop doesn’t have a built in optical drive), as well as booting into the same from a thumb drive. In each case I selected ‘Repair your computer” from the menu, only to get to the same scenario as before… with the default Win7 wallpaper displayed, but no sign of the System Recover Options tool/dialog… so I can’t even begin to try and repair the install.
On the plus side, she finally seems to understand what I’ve been telling her for years… that she needs to regularly back-up her system. Unfortunately all her research and papers from her current studies at college are stuck on the drive… and we really need to get them back.
Does anyone have any suggestions that might help us get this partition accessible again? Worst case scenario we’ll have to go with a data recovery service… but I’d obviously like to avoid that if I can due to the cost.
Thanks.