Laptop looping (Windows Load Screen...BSOD...Restart)

[dude_56013]

Okay, so my friend is try to have me fix his laptop. I've never seen this problem before and I'm a bit confused, but have an idea of what the problem is.

Here's the scoop.

You fire up the lappy, Windows XP starts booting, then you get a BSOD:
UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME
0X000000ED (0X8644AC98, 0XC0000185, 0X00000000, 0X00000000)

First thing I tried was popping in the repair disc (thinking it was an MBR problem or something of that sort). Well, when I press "R" to get into the repair options, it says there's no hard drive on the computer!

Second thing I tried was the disk diagnostic in the BIOS menu. It failed in a matter of seconds.

I'm thinking the HDD is dead, but don't know for sure. I'm going to pop in Kubuntu and see if I can boot in to it and see if the HDD shows up and is accessable. If not, I'm going to open up the lappy and make sure that the HDD is secure. I'm not sure what the deal is. Obviously, the HDD is working to some degree if the XP loading screen is appearing.

Anyone have any ideas?

 

[essentialx3]

If you can get the BSOD, your HDD isn't dead. It sounds like you're probably right, MBR problem. Use the repair disc to somehow boot to the primary partition then run fixboot and fixmbr.

 

[dude_56013]

If you can get the BSOD, your HDD isn't dead. It sounds like you're probably right, MBR problem. Use the repair disc to somehow boot to the primary partition then run fixboot and fixmbr.

If you read my post, I cannot use the repair disc. It tells me there is no hard drive!

EDIT - Kubuntu listed NOTHING in media. Failed disk? If it isn't, I'm not sure how I'm supposed repair it if nothing can see it.

2nd EDIT - QTParted found the disk...I'm not sure what to do from here.

3rd EDIT - QTParted cannot report the disk space used on partition 1 or 2 (first 2 on the disk). It lists used space as "N/A".

 

[berry120]

Have you tried booting up in knoppix and mounting it there?

EDIT: I'd also try checking the SMART status if enabled, and the diagnostic tools on this disk, everyone should have one knocking around - it's brilliant!! http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

 

[dude_56013]

Yeah. UBCD4Win was my next idea. It's booting as we speak. Thank you for that suggestion though.

EDIT/UPDATE - Well, UBCD4Win was a bust. It was very laggy for some reason, both my old disc that usually works like a charm, and one that I recently upgraded to. I have a feeling it was because it is Windows XP Media Center Ed and I don't have that, so the CD was made from XP.

Anywho, I burned a newer copy of UBCD and am running the Seagate diagnostic on the drive now. I'm doing the long test, so it'll take a while, but so far there's already 3 errors. I'm thinking this HDD is probably toast.

I even took the HDD out, used my sata->usb adapter and plugged it into my computer. Windows said that the disk could be initalized or something like that...so just another thing to add to the suspicion that it's dead.

UPDATE/FIXED (7-19-09. 3:00AM) - Well, I went out to work on my engine rebuild for a while and let the Long DST finish up. It came back with 3 errors total. I fixed all 3 of them with the Seagate utility and got it booting into Windows. I then ran chkdsk and everything came back okay...for now. YAY! Anyways, it's still really really slow, so I don't doubt that it will fail again soon. I'll probably just tell my friend to back everything up and wait for the inevitable. But, at least it's working now.