Harddrive Problem - Help!

BananaMann · 05 Feb 2014

Was given a laptop off a friend awhile back, he said he kept getting a blue screen error off it, so never used it. I decided to get around to looking at it last night, and yes it does boot into a blue screen error, after loading the Windows 7 start up after BIOS. The error is “Unmountable Boot Volume” ........

I thought ahh well, i'll just reinstall Windows and have rid of it, but it just sticks on the setup page, with the blue circle going round and round, i left it for a few hours but still came back to the same thing. I did a Google search, as you do before asking for help and followed some tips, but they didnt help me. Those were putting the recovery disc in, selecting the repair my pc, and entering a few command promts like 'Chkdsk d: r/' but got nowhere, one command similar to the one i just typed seemed to do something, it was going through files and repairing them, i thought i was onto a winner but it seemed to freeze after about 6 long hours, so gave up.

Ive tried the hard drive in other laptops, and have the same problem with it, but as its booting in some way, instead of displaying things like 'No OS installed' or 'No Bootmanager' i believe the hard drive isnt fried?. I have never had this kinda problem before, no matter what disc i put in to try and reformat the hard drive, it just sticks on setup, or goes back to the blue screen error. Am i fighting a losing battle here trying to save the hard drive, or should i just buy a new one?.

Usually if a hard drive doesnt show in the BIOS, i destroy it and toss it away, but it is showing as registered, so i believe something could be done?. Is there a free boot disc program i could use to reformat the hard drive that way? any help and advice would be great, dont think it matters here but im using Windows 7 & the laptop is an Advent Modena Blue..

matts6887 · 05 Feb 2014

I would download the hard drive diagnostics from the following link using a good computer(if you can get access to a good one) and then download that program onto a flash drive; or if you have a external hard drive of any kind you can use that by going into the bios and selecting that as the first boot device after downloading the program onto the drive and then run the program to scan for hard drive errors.

Hard Drive Diagnostics Tools and Utilities (Storage) - TACKtech Corp.

Post back if you encounter any issues running the program.

Golden · 06 Feb 2014

Do you know what the BSOD Bugcheck code was?

BananaMann said:

Usually if a hard drive doesnt show in the BIOS, i destroy it and toss it away, but it is showing as registered, so i believe something could be done?. Is there a free boot disc program i could use to reformat the hard drive that way?

Boot from the Windows 7 installation DVD, then at the languages screen press SHIFT+F10. This will open the cmd window with the prompt X:\Sources

Now type the following:

diskpart <enter>
list disk <enter>

Disk 0 is probably the disk you want to work with - confirm that here if not sure by letting us know what is listed.

select disk 0 <enter>
clean all <enter>

This will take a few hours, scrubbing everything that was on the disk. Close the cmd window, then try installing again. During installation you will need to create a new partition.

Disk - Clean and Clean All with Diskpart Command

jumanji · 06 Feb 2014

Did you try this?

1. Boot from the Windows 7 DVD.
2. Select Repair my computer.
3. Select Command Prompt and try rebuilding the master boot record at the command prompt with the following command: bootrec /fixboot and then rebooting.

Of course a clean wipe as suggested by Golden is always good before reinstall but I am just curious to know whether you tried rebuilding the MBR at anytime.

But for writing zeros, I would rather recommend the manufacturer's Dignostic/ repair utility in this case - if one is available for that brand HDD - that can check the integrity of the HDD first. If it passes, one can write zeros using that same utility. So you kill two birds in one shot.