Unmountable Boot volume

[jwr_1986]

Well I've done something stupid. I was playing with truecrypt and everything was going fine until my backup software ran (Dantz retrospect (came with my maxtor one touch)). Everything began operating real slow after the backup completed and then I could here the hard drive spooling up and down. First instinct I rebooted. Now right after the windows xp screen I get a stop error Unmountable boot volume. It's a dell inspiron 5150 running windows xp home edition.

From what I've read elsewhere the files may still be accessible using a Linux boot disk and the error is caused by a flag that once cleared allows everything to run normally again.

The encrypted part is only a 256 mb container not the whole partition.

My goal is to recover my pictures and documents. The stuff I was encrypting is of no consequence it was just test fodder.

Any thoughts on the matter would be appreciated even if to say I'm a complete *****.

Normally I'd say well i screwed up but the photos are mostly family ones my grandmother took with the digital camera i got her for Christmas. I really don't want to lose any of those on her.

Thanks for your thoughts

Jesse

 

[fastco]

You could try to boot off of the XP cd into the recovery console and run the command FIXBOOT or FIXMBR and see if you can boot off of the hard drive again. If that doesn't work download a BartPe disk, burn it, boot off of it and that will let you access the drive to recover files. You can also add the Deepburner program so you can burn the files right from BartPe. http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

 

[jwr_1986]

Forgive me if I'm a bit skittish. Both tools said they could mess things up worse. Is that mostly just a disclaimer or is it a real possibility. Thanks for your quick response.

Jesse

 

[fastco]

If you are referring to fixboot and fixmbr, they won't format your drive. How much worse could it get?

 

[foofire]

Hey,
I just had this same problem with my comp. It was a Toshiba Satellite and it came up with unmountable boot volume. This thing is actually a virus. A friend and I decided to try to back up my hard drive and just try to format it. However the way we were going to back it up was with a portable hard drive reader. ( it was a 2.5" USB 2.0 Ext IDE drive enclosure by Firestack @ geeks.com has the case for about 10 dollars) Anyway, when we took my HDD out to put it into the case and read it off my friends computer, his comp reconfigured the boot sequence and my comp has worked ever since.
If that doesn't work, you can still try to back it up and format. I don't know what else to do, this is just what worked for me.

 

[jwr_1986]

I'll give fixboot and fixmbr a shot. As for this being a virus it's not. It is a flag that's put on the drive to keep windows from causing more damage by running. It's actually a sefety feature built into Windows XP.

Jesse