Recycle your Computers & Technology with us.

What are some possible fixes to the unmountable boot volume error?

Posted By : Student of Katharine Gibbs School - New York on September 22, 2003

Follow us on Facebook   Follow us on Twitter   Follow us on LinkedIn

Let Data Doctors be your personal IT department today

Computer will start up to where you see the windows xp logo. It will then give you an error message which states: UMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME

It also states that if this is the first time then just restart wich did not work.

It also says that if this is recurring then I am to check for any recently added hardware of soft ware. There was no new hardware added. It says to restart the computer in safe mode and disable any recent software, which I tryed but it still gives me the same message in safe mode. It also says to disable BIOS memory options like caching and shadowing. The tech info given is as follows: ***STOP: 0x000000 edc0x80e648c8, 0xc0000042, 0x00000000, 0x00000000

I tryed to boot up from the operating system disk to no avail.

What are my options at this point?

This question was answered on September 22, 2003. Much of the information contained herein may have changed since posting.


Was this a new installation? If so, try going into your BIOS and setting the hard drive speed to 'auto' or get a newer 80 wire IDE cable and try that on the hard drive.

if that dont work I found this at the MS web site:

When you use volumes that use the NTFS file system on integrated device electronics (IDE) drives with caching enabled, you may receive the following error message during startup:

Stop 0x000000ED

Unmountable_Boot_Volume

The normal recovery process in such a case is to run the chkdsk /r command from Recovery Console, and then continue On OEM versions of Windows XP, the Recovery Console may not be accessible If this fix has not been included in the OEM build of Windows XP, you may not be able to enter Recovery Console and run the chkdsk /r command for recovery

Because of the write-pattern optimization in IDE disk drives, the caching routines sometimes write data out of order to keep drive write speeds at the fastest possible level depending on where data is located on the disk This opens a timing window where the NTFS disk system could have critical tables damaged if a write is not finished Microsoft has recommended in the past that caching on IDE drives be turned off on programs with somewhat critical data that is stored on the disk or for situations that allow the slight drop in overall speed Programs with critical data may need to use SCSI drives, which have better control of data transactions

To resolve this problem, obtain the latest service pack for Windows XP.

About the author

Posted by Student of Katharine Gibbs School - New York on September 22, 2003

Need Help with this Issue?

We help people with technology! It's what we do.
Contact or Schedule an Appointment with a location for help!