Unmountable_boot_disk

A friend of mine got a UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_DISK error when booting his WinXP pro both in normal mode and safe mode. I tryed selecting the 'Last good profile' (or whatever it's called) and it didnt work either.

I then booted into the winxp cd and selected repair windows. Then I ran chkdsk with the option to repair. The next time I booted the computer it worked fine. So everything seems fine now. I'm however a bit concerned about why this happend out of the blue. I actually formated and installed winxp onto this computer less than 8 days ago.

Is this a clear sign that the harddisk is starting to fail ? It's a 30GB IBM disk by the way. How can I check the status of the disk ? Is there any monitor programs out there, I tryed looking on IBM's homepage but couldnt find anything. The disk is about 3 years old. I've done two full diskscans of the disk.

Any suggestions?

 

It the drive checks out OK, verify that your friend has installed all the latest critical updates from Microsoft.

Please Read this .pdf for an example of what could be wrong.

 

This usually happens to XP machines. I have run into this many times. What causes it I have no clue. In most cases the harddrive is fine and will not fail. It seems to me that XP during shutdown/startup blows up the start sequence. If you can change an XP machine to boot SOS mode which shows you the drivers that are loading. My experience is when it is loading the AGP driver or mobo controller chips (Via/Intel) drivers.

 

If using UDMA mode on the drive(s), be sure that the 80-conductor, 40-pin UDMA cable is being used. XP is less forgiving about the wrong cable than 98. Or, disable UDMA in the BIOS setup.