Windows 7: trying to fix unmountable boot volume

I have an acer laptop that i upgraded from vista to 32bit windows 7 that i installed few months ago through USB because my cd drive doesnt work. Now I am getting the unmountable boot volume so i am trying to boot the installation cd from my USB. It gets past the loading files, then starting windows but after that i get a black screen with just the mouse arrow. Last night I kept this up all night thinking it was just slow but no luck. Oh just to see I made a usb with the vista recovery disk and that worked up to the part where I had to select an OS to repair. Any ideas??

Is it possible that I am not waiting long enough? Is their anything that I can disable in bios that might interfere.

Try these tests:
And this one:
What happened when you got to the screen to select an OS? Was anything showing in the screen?

I cant run those tests because I cannot start normally or in safe mode. So I have read that the only way to repair is to use the installation disk/cd. Even though I have windows 7, I tried the vista repair cd and it booted to the screen where you select a OS but it says to select a vista OS which I dont have so it was blank. I am wondering why that worked but my windows 7 installation usb/cd wont on my pc. I used this same usb on another computer and it booted to the install windows screen normally so its not the USB.

You could download a 7 recovery disk (not install disk) as they are the same for all versions you just need to select x86 or x64.
Most of the suggestions above do not require you to boot windows, memtest86 is an iso download that creates a bootable disk (bit like win disk) and chkdsk will run from a command prompt

Heres the link for recovery disk might be worth a try, just download and burn
Download Windows 7 System Recovery Discs — The NeoSmart Files

Check your SATA operation in your BIOS. If its set to AHCI try setting to ATA and re-run your repair options and that should sort it.

first goto your bios and switch your ide option to compatible, then run the startup repair. After repair is done then go back into the ide option and change it back to the original option then normal bootup. It worked for me!

man i had the same problem. black screen with white arrow is as far as i could get,nothing would load. tried to reinstall windows by using the installation disk but it wouldn't boot from there either, just black screen. eventually i read this thread about switching your IDE options, didn't know what that meant at all, but i got to the set-up menu by pressing F12 or F10 or something and went to my boot order list and switched it so that this IDE: SC098709 (just hit random numbers there) thing was first and it ended up working somehow. the Start-up Repair actually loaded and went through... found no errors, but i was able to go to this extra menu afterwards where i could Recover from Disk Image or do a Memory Test (I don't remember the exact names of the options), and i did the Memory one and it went through the tests, restarted, and has worked perfectly ever since. Hope it helps.

(P.S. I may have just been lucky and it happened to load the Start-Up Repair that time, idk... my friend and I were just trying different things and restarting it a lot while watching tv and it eventually worked! keep trying... I hadn't successfully booted it for 8 months according to what some test told me, so there's always hope!)