Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Unmountable Boot Volume... WHAT??

Plugging in...

Blue screen of death, anyone? That's what it is called when Microsoft Windows has a serious problem. The computer in question was humming along nicely, albeit quite elderly (8 years) in terms of computing life. And after a short struggle starting, the bright blue background with white letters halted the poor thing in its tracks.

The computer's owner was perplexed as the message indicated something new had been attached and Windows balked at the new attachment. This turned out to be a misguided error message, but the message was still loud and clear: I'm not starting.

After some cajoing by the Tutor (going into setup, starting from an original Windows CD), a much clearer message surfaced as to the problem: unmountable boot volume. Oh. That didn't clear it up for the reader? It didn't clear it up for the computer owner either!

Unmountable boot volume means: the area on the hard drive the computer looks at when starting, failed. A bit of diagnostics revealed an unrecoverable hard drive failure. The diagnostic software was able to repair 25% of the area, but was unable to continue. Not good news. The hard drive needed replacing.

Replace or buy new? Depends on age of computer, computer owner's financial situation, cost of hard drive and installation and potential cost of data transfer, if recovery is at all possible from the failed drive.

Lesson: make sure there is a current back up of the computer's data at all times. The blue screen of death doesn't always give notice in advance of appearing! And for the record, it doesn't always mean a hard drive failure, but BACKUPS are critical all the time: fire, flood, theft, failure, etc.

ALWAYS REMEMBER: before calling for help - is it plugged in, is there a clear error message, and is it turned on?

Unplugged

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