I have this 160GB laptop drive that displayed "Unmountable boot" error a couple days ago.
I followed the advice on microsoft website that said to use chkdsk /p ( In hidnsight, and after reading this forum now, I have found out that was a mistake
).
The drive started working again, and I left it alone until I got an external drive to transfer to, but by that time it did not work.
It boots GRUB, and it starts loading XP but gets stuck halfway ( I can also start loading Ubuntu but that gets stuck halfway too ). On XP, safe mode, it gets stuck at the same driver all the time ( 440agp.* or something ).
XP, after getting stuck, displays that unmountable error again.
Thinking it was merely a boot file problem, I got a 2.5" -> 3.5" converter and connected it to my desktop, so it wouldn't boot windows from it and I could transfer my files.
Here's the weird thing now, I have it as 4th boot device ( so it won't try to boot ahead of anything else ). But when the computer boots up from my healthy drives, it gets stuck just like if the defective drive was the main drive? It does show up in BIOS with all the right information.
If I even have the drive connected, XP cannot load. As soon as I try to boot with it not being connected, it boots up no problem. I have another HD that is exactly the same, but empty ( same model , same firmware ), so I made sure that I am not connecting it the wrong way. The empty drive shows up on BIOS, on Windows, everything.
I wanted to make an image of the drive, but I can't connect it to any computer by the looks of it, because it then doesn't let the computer boot. Now, having a drive that is exactly the same, I figured that it might be a shorted PCB pulling down voltage enough to freeze the PC. I swapped boards, and the empty ( new ) drive with the PCB from the defective drive works, no problems at all, but the defective drive with the new PCB does the same ( I now realize this was a mistake to even attempt this as it is now narrowed to disk/head damage?
)
Any insight on what could make the entire computer freeze on booting from other drives? It even freezes in the exact same spot every time, even when I have the defective drive disabled in BIOS.
It just doesn't make any sense ( but then again I have no idea about it anyways
).
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