UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME on clean install?

Got a brand new Maxtor 80G HD and plugged it in (no slave drives behind it). Boot sequence set to A: then CD-ROM, popped in legit copy of WinXP and tried to install. It formatted the drive to NTFS and when it tried to reboot, I got the blue screen with error in subject line. Multiple reboots, reinstall attempts futile.

This has happened on three other drives. Gave up and took it to a place to have it looked at. Guy says the problem is motherboard-related. Somehow I don't believe him because when I put in my old Win98SE HD, it booted fine. A third harddrive had Win98SE upgraded to Win2k (FAT32, couldn't get it to NTFS) and that ran fine.

System details: Acorp i815 chipset w/Dual Socket 370 FCPGA PIII's @ 1GHz. Clock speed set at 100MHz w/~390MB SDRAM. Primary IDE has ONLY the new Maxtor HD. Secondary IDE has two CDRoms. Both CPU's register upon bootup and with the harddrive that had Win2k on it (sys info showed dual cpus). This equipment was bought new as of two weeks ago. My friend says it's the IDE cable, but I used the same cable between all three HD's, and only XP doesn't seem to like it.

Help please as I am so frustrated with this! Guy I brought it so didn't like the fact that I only spent $30 on my new Mobo, but he's also not fond of Wintel either , thus my suspicion that he would blame hardware for anything other than AMD.

 

If it is an 80 gig drive, it must be UDMA-capable. You will receive that error if you do not have the 80-wire, 40-connector UDMA cable and UDMA is enabled in the BIOS. Try disabling UDMA in the BIOS or get the other cable and try it.

Another thing you might try............
Since the 80 gig is the only drive on that IDE channel, try removing all the jumpers from the drive. Some drives need the jumper only if there is another drive on the same channel.

 

http://maxtor.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/...RfbHZsMT00JnBfY2F0X2x2bDI9fmFueX4mcF9wYWdlPTE

 

Abraxas,

You were absolutely right. I did everything I could think of, except use the UDMA 80-pin cable. I did that, reinstalled XP and it is working fine thus far. I wish I had known that from the start! Would have saved me many hours of my life. Thanks!

 

Great! Looks like your friend was right, too.
Having spent a great deal of time trying to enable UDMA before I knew about that cable, I totally understand your frustration.