unmountable boot error with 2nd drive

I installed a brand new 200 gig hard drive (slave, not OS) about 3 months ago. I was never able to get windows to recognize all 200 gigs, no matter what I did. I went ahead and used it anyway and everything seemed to work relatively well until just recently. I started hearing the hard drive scratch sound which I thought was my newer drive. Rebooting would solve the problem temporarily, but eventually, it sounded like the drive was pegged. However, the red light on the front didn't light up like there was a lot of hard drive activity.

Anyway, today I turned on my monitor and it was stuck at the windows boot screen. It never progressed further, so I hit restart on it and from then on got the BSOD. Sometimes it would give an error and sometimes it wouldn't. The most common error though was unmountable boot volume. What's strange is that I unplugged the newer drive and windows would boot. Now, it booted up and rebooted a couple of times. But at least it booted up finally. I tried plugging the drive back in and again got the unmountable boot volume error.

Does this sound like a problem with my OS or my main drive or a problem with the newer drive? What can I check to try to fix this? Thanks.

 

Thanks Pete. I did that same search, but I'm on babysitting duty right now and I can't get to that computer to try the boot.ini file solution. I figured I'd post the question here so maybe when I was able to work on it, I'd have few more options to try too. But anyway, the computer only sees about 130 gigs. I knew it wouldn't see all 200, but only 130? I was told that it might have something to do with my motherboard, but even after updating the BIOS, it still didn't recognize the full size. Hopefully the wife will be home soon so I can get back to work on it and try the boot.ini solution Thanks for your help.

 

Pete, I've gone into my bios to enable booting only to my cdrom. I've disabled booting from every other device. But for some reason, it doesn't seem to look at the cdrom, but automatically bypasses it and boots from the hard drive. I've searched the whole bios for any other mention of boot devices, but I couldn't find any. Is there some trick to getting it to boot from the CD?

 

did I miss something???

What are you trying to 'boot' from in the CD drive? Are you trying to boot from the Windows CD?

B

 

Yes, the windows xp pro CD. As described at http://www.techtips4u.com/kb/sw/SW00014.htm

 

cakewalkr7,

Sorry for my faculties leaving me for a moment.
Here's a couple of simple things you can check... make sure the disk is clean and not scratched. (the windows disk can be a little particular) Have you tried using the disk to boot a different machine (if available)?
As far as your problem being with the harddrive... go to the manufacturer's website. They usually offer a free diagnostic tool that you can download and run from a diskette. If I come up with anything else, I'll post back. If you get another BSOD, post the complete error message, possibly a clue in there.

B

 

I'll give it a try again when I get home, but I'm certain that's exactly how I started with it. When that didn't work, I disabled all boot devices except for the cdrom.

After I let the computer sit for a little bit, I plugged my 2nd hard drive back in just hoping it would work. Sure enough, it all fired up fine. So, I backed up the files I needed to. Then when I went back to the computer about 3 hours later, the windows boot up screen (progress bar screen) was on. It wasn't progressing (animating, just not actually moving past that screen). So, apparently at some point, it just decided to reboot. I think I forgot to mention in my first post that it had done that one other time yesterday while I was away from it for awhile.

 

Yes, they've always been set as Master / Slave.

 

I'll look into all this when I get home. Thank you Pete.