"Could not find Boot Device"

My friend's computer was making a funny noise last night; thought it was harddrive sqeal so he rebooted. Upon restart, he received error: "Could not find Boot Device "

I know on Win98/SE that io.sys must be there and I think on WinNT it's ndldr.sys but is there such a file for XP that might be missing causing this error? From that boot-up error, sounds like his harddrive might require a repartitioning and formatting, but I'm hoping someone might know of a solution?

 

when you start the computer did the drive show up in the bios.
If not you may have a bad drive.

 

Previous night, Norton said "Unable to scan email for viruses "

les - Drive shows up in BIOS and the WinXP splash screen shows up, then option menu pops up and when selecting SafeMode, blue screen of death appears.

 

I went over to look at the computer, and when booting windows normally, it will display the initial XP boot screen, and then blue-screen with white text error: "unmountable_boot_volume ". Tried using Windows Support Q297185, but he does not have a UDMA controller and it was not in the process of being upgraded when this happened.

Tried booting from CD and running chkdsk c: /r. It will work through 75% completion, then immediately drops down to 50%, and hangs there for a good 5-10mins with the harddrive clicking four times, then pause, then click four times, pause, etc. When running just chkdsk, it takes 30 seconds to complete and message says something to the effect that "volume is okay ".

Leads me to believe that maybe he got a boot sector virus, as Norton was unable to scan for something in his email the night before he shut his computer down. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated! He just wants to get his mail and some other files off, and it sounds like this is possible if he slaves the drive on another NTFS system (he's doing that tomorrow).

 

Sorry

...but it seems that you HD is gone. That "funny noise" sounded to me like a head crash...

Cheers!

 

Boot disk for XP...

PDubs,

Although it doesn't sound very hopeful, you should try making the boot disk that is described at XXCOPY and see if it can tell you anything. To make it you will have to have access to a machine running XP normally. As the article says, this disk will allow for booting without relying on the MBR of the HD or any root files either. Read carefully and follow the directions to the letter. It's especially important to format the disk on the XP machine making it.

Even if it doesn't help you this time, it's something every XP user should have on hand (maybe even two copies) for emergency use. It has much more to offer than a standard Windows Start Up Disk since it will actually boot you into Windows if there isn't some major problem outside the MBR and root files. Most folks aren't aware of this so perhaps this post will help to get the information out.

Good luck