Startup Issue

When I boot the computer I see a message that says:
"cannot determine file system of drive\??\volume}336" could not get the rest of the numbers as it is so quick, everything seems okay, or is the start of something going wrong, I have 2 drives one called "C" unpartitioned and a second drive called "D" also unpartitioned, plus a DVD Rom drive and a DVD writer drive, any comments would be appreciated.

Paul

 

When you say unpartitioned, I hope you mean with one partition on each drive. what formatting (NTFS or FAT32) is used on those partitions?

 

For some reason I could not edit my first reply.

This may be relevant:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/176970/en-us

 

You say the drives are unpartitioned. If they are unpartitioned then they are "freespace" on the disks of the HDD. You need to partition and format freespace before it becomes a "drive ".
Edit: unpartitioned and drive cannot be one and the same. Check the descriptions at the geekspeak link in my signature or at www.pcguide.com.

Check the HDD with the manufacturer's utilities to see if there are any problems.

Matt

 

Ahhh, maybe you mean unformatted, the drives could be partitioned, but not formatted. You will have the option of formatting them as FAT32 or NTFS. The error message would be be to say that there is partitioned space on the disk (C: or D: ), but there is no formatting information for those drives, hence no file system.

Matt

 

Sorry wrong choice of words, both drives work fine with one partion each and using the NTFS system, my only concern was the message that I keep seeing as explained in the first thread in this post.

 

Maybe the problem remains the same. There is a an unformatted drive.

Matt

 

Surely if a drive is unformatted I would not be able to use it and all of my system diagnostics programs, Everest etc show the drives as working fine with no errors, just that startup message worries me, could it be looking at a optical drive or a card drive (Mounted on front of CPU) ?

Paul

 

If you have any media in those drives, then maybe. That is, if there are memory cards in the card reader or CD/DVDs in the optical drives. Remove any media from the drives and see if the error message stops (would there be a blank disk/card in any of those drives?).

I take it that the message appears before Windows starts to load. This will be the time when the BIOS of the computer is setting the hardware and looking for bootable drives/disks. It is seeing a drive that is formatted in a way it is unfamiliar with.

It does show those two question marks (cannot determine file system of drive\??\volume)? If your harddrive is on a standard IDE controller (not SATA) it would be designated as Drive 0, so you are probably right that is not a drive on the harddisk.

Go into the BIOS settings at startup (it may say "Press Del/F1 to enter Configuration "), use the motherboard manual/User Guide if you are not sure. Look for the startup sequence. It may be set as something like
Floppy
CD
Drive 0
If it includes a drive that you are not familiar with, deselect it. Some maybe SCSI, USB, network, etc. If that seems to be the problem, but the setting keeps reverting back to what it was originally, get a new CMOS battery. It looks like a silver coin on the motherboard. The motherboard manual/User Guide should tell you where it is and how to replace it (it should just clip and unclip easily).

Matt

 

Partly cured, After installing Roxio9 unknown to me it had changed the drive letters around and as I use TweakUI and had some of the drives to be not shown due to card readers on printer scanner and CPU, Explorer looked very busy.

Managed to move drives around (Disk Management) and sorted out drives to be seen, but I am left with some of the drives saying "XD Card" & "SD Card" and the words "XD Card" being shown for my 2 x optical drives but it is not possible to change the names as when attempting to type something in the box, nothing happens.

At least the good news is the startup error has gone, just need to sort out the naming convention for the drives.........

Edited Section:
Just managed to rename drives (words) by moving the optical drives around to the old XD & SD slots so I could rename them to more meaningful names for the CD/DVD drives then move them back to the correct positions.

Thanks for everybody's help.

Paul