Well, it looks like I'm the next to suffer a comp failure.

The main PC will not boot, it keeps giving a bsod saying UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_ERROR.

Safemode doesn't work either. I've tried googling the error without much luck.

It did boot once this morning, but after my Dad had finished he switched it off. He didn't do anything to it that would have broken it.


Help.

Ok, after finding some instructions on the internet, I booted from the XP cd and tried to get to the recovery console.

It then gleefully informed me that there are no hard drives installed on the computer. Bugger.

I've had that, your supposed to do a chkdsk on it in Recovery console, its just the ntfs mft was still being edited while it got turned off wrong so its protecting itself.

This appears to be what youve tried, what do you mean no disks, what if you go in a bit deeper, go into setup, what drives do it detect then.

Oh and let me give you a hint, if it's giving that error THE DRIVE IS WORKING AS IT NEEDS TO READ IT FOR INFO.

Get your ass on GTalk and talk to me and I'll do my magic

I have had this error many times at work. The blue screen message appears before Windows tries to boot.

The problem was down to a faulty motherboard, and the motherboard was replaced under warranty. The hard disk drive controller chip was faulty.

You will more than likely be able to detect a hard disk drive by loading up SATA or RAID drivers from a floppy disk. Some older motherboards don't work in the Windows XP setup when you use SATA drives and require these third party drivers to be loaded. I believe you need to press F6 after loading the Win XP CD in order to load/specify these third party drivers.

You can download these drivers from either the PC manufacturers website, or the motherboard manufacturers website.

Have fun

Or try a linux live disc to see if that finds anything?

Well I can't access setup/bios as my Dad has placed a password on it.

I have that old Ubuntu disk Si, would that do?

It might, but if not youll have to get something like Knoppix. Also look for something called Spinrite, I've heard its good for magically making hard drives come back to life.

Any updates as of my suggestions over msn/gtalk metty

Yea, it turns out that the C partition was corrupt. So corrupt it was preventing the Bart PE thing my dad uses to restore backups from working.

The solution was to delete the partition. Then it let us restore the backup.

However the PC is now being scanned for viruses etc which will take most of the day, but with luck I should be online this evening.

And the recovery console didn't work because I'm a noob and don't understand about Raid.

nor me but im a newb not a noob

hope to see u in training tonight then!

Met, you shouldn't be concerning yourself with RAID at all, it's the multiple HDD thing.

We have two hard-drives, with several partitions. That's all I really know.

Need to know moar.