Boot Sector Corrupted in XP ! ? ! ? ! ?

[Rasta Monsta]

OK, can we start this thread again without all the smart-assery? There was a topic in "General Discussion" called "Smoothvision killed my hard drive" or something, which everyone (including me) got a big laugh out of.

Well, I wasn't laughing this morning when I got the failed startup screen "Unmountable_Boot_Volume" and then couldn't even enter safe mode. There have been three or four people with similar problems.

What the heck is up with this? Can a video driver cause this type of data corruption? Plus, how can I recover without the ability to even see safe mode? If the disc won't mount, I can't even run the installer & repair it. "Last Known Good Configuration" also fails.

Any suggestions short of reformatting?

Crying like a Scotsman watching a boatload of Glenfiddich sail off to America,

Rasta

p.s. Hey Neptune755, how did you get past the "unmountable" problem into safe mode??

[wlp5]

Same thing happened to me on a friend's new pc I helped him set up. It has nothing to do with smoothvision. The usual suspect is behind it VIA (which I'm gueesing you're using), probably KT266.

What to do
1) Boot from the XP CD. Go to recovery console. You won't be able to see your hard disk, but go to the cd dir \i386. Use chkdsk.exe and if needed fixmbr.exe too (usually the first one does the job). Reboot and your hard disk will be as you left it, no need to enter safe mode or load previous configuration.
2) Remove IDE TOOL. This is the wource of the problem.... I'm talking about the seperate utility that lately came out by VIA. Instead use the default XP drivers for HD controllers

In fact the problem may appear after many reboots after you've installed IDE Tool, but I'm sure it's the one, because my friend fixed it (like above) once per day and after we removed IDE-Tool it's stable for a month now.

Hope that helps....

[wlp5]

Sorry didn't see your sig. Now I'm sure it's a KT266(A) issue.

[Rasta Monsta]

Thanks for the reply. . .but I didn't use that util. I'll try your chkdsk suggestion, though, thanks!

[Yeuemmaimai]

are you using a highpoint controller for your raid? I had a BE6 that gave me the same error on the internal raid controller but once i moved to a promise controller the problem dissapeared.

[Rasta Monsta]

Nope, just onboard ATA-100 & WinXP native drivers.

rasta

[Neptune755]

Originally posted by Yeuemmaimai
are you using a highpoint controller for your raid? I had a BE6 that gave me the same error on the internal raid controller but once i moved to a promise controller the problem dissapeared.

check the other thread. i posted what i did.

[X]

Have you tried disabling the WRITE CACHE feature for your hard disk?

Look at the properties for your hard drive in device manager. There is a check box in one of the pages to disable this feature.

Write caching is a performance feature, but can lead to disk corruption issues if the system is not 100% stable. And YEAH, drivers can lead to the lack of stability. But there may be other causes.

[Robisoda]

I had the same problem with the 3286 drivers, had to go back to the 3281s. It has nothing to do with IDE since it happened to me using pure SCSI. It's not a KT266 (I'm on Pro 133A) issue although it may (most likely) be a Via issue. I'm hoping the next driver set will fix it.

[captfrag]

i had the same problem with disk corruption on xp.
i don´t have a via chipset (sis735) and my hole disk got corrupted, not only my boot sector.... bad luck for me. i also use a highpoint controller, maybe thats the problem or xp itself
i decided to go back to windows 2000 - never had a similar problem there and the gui is not mickey mouse like there...

this is my setup:
athlon xp 1800+
sis 735 chipset (ecs k7s5a)
ati 8500 retail
2x crucial DDR 2100 256 mb
highpoint hpt 370 raid controller
some other not important stuff

greetz
Captain FRAG

[euan]

Originally posted by Rasta Monsta

Crying like a Scotsman watching a boatload of Glenfiddich sail off to America,

There's no reason to cry when we know we pissed in it!

[BlackBirdSR]

Same problem..

just that sometimes I get a bluescreen saying ATAPI.sys is the error..

booting with last safe config usually helps..

In case of the Boot Volume Error, chkdsk as described helps a lot.

I think I heard that that problem is caused by either a hard disk controller, or UDAM100, if you have the option try to use your UDMA66 Connectors only.. and try putting the CD Driver on the same controller you use your Hard disk..

still trying to solve this problem..
I looked it up in the forums for my Epox boards.. nothing.. is it just me or is this error occuring quite often with Radeon Cards?

[bigcid1]

I have a a7a266 mb v 1.03 and It has a ali 1547 chipset
I had that same problem and I found out what it was .when I turned on large system cache in memory management ,It gave me that error.
after about 3 formats I figured out
put xp cd in drive reboot
go to repair console
at prompt type chkdsk
rebbot into safe mode ,turn off large system cache
thanks,bigcid1

[Silentst2000]

I had that problem...Fixed it by taking one of my pc2100 crucial ddr sticks out...now I only have 256 megs of ram but lock ups and BS are now gone...there really is a ****ing glitch out there that needs fixed.

[BlackBirdSR]

Well that gives us like different 6 solutions for 1 problem..

would like to know what the real reason for this problem is..

[Endymion]

Perhaps when smoothvision is turned on, the power requirements of the 8500 increase and for systems that are pushing the limits of their power supplies (especially fast AMD systems) start having problems.

[BlackBirdSR]

I'm not using Smoothvision, only having a R100 in this system the error occours (R200 drivers though)

[wlp5]

People, don't confuse things. Those problems described above are not the same. My solution was reffering to a message that XP shows at boot about "Unmountable Boot Volume". This is not your average hard disk failure or faulty ram errors or boot sector - fat corruption. Actually nothing was wrong with the disk itself, just the drivers. So pay attention and don't reply like "Hey I got the same problem. My pc won't boot

[pointreyes]

This is not in reference to the main post but could be helpful for the others that posted about disk corruption.

I was experiencing quite a bit of disk corruption on my NTFS partitions in XP Pro (Event ID: 55) using IBM 60GXP 60Gig on an IWill KK266Plus-R with the 64Meg Radeon DDR VIVO. However, I seemed to have fixed the problem.

Don't use the memory timing of 5! Switch back to 6. My problem has gone away.

[iraklis2000]

I have a p4 1.7 Radeon 8500 Retail. I got the write error myself. Alo my network starts acting funny. it will start loading a web page, and then stop in the middle giving me the default window smessage server can't be reached, check network settings junk! this only happens with the un-certified drivers. i format and go back to the non-smoothvision certified drivers and everything is ok....
ATI just gives me their default response to my emails about checking their FAQs yada yada yada.....

Common!

BTW: I have a WD drive. 3com Integrated Network card. 850chipset RDRAM

[billharris44]

>>I had that same problem and I found out what it was .when I turned on large system cache in memory management ,It gave me that error.>>

Same thing happened to me. Turned on large system cache, shut down for the night, powered up in morning--hosed. unmountable_boot_volume. It's not limited to a particular chipset or hard drive, though--I've got a P4 and the 850 chipset, so it's not specifically a VIA issue.

[Steppy]

You know what this is reminding me of? In win98 when a large cache was used sometimes when you shut the computer down, it would power off before everything from the cache could be written to disk properly and caused data corruption. MS put a fix out that delayed the shutdown by a few second to make sure that the cache was totally flushed. I'm willing to bet a ton that this problem is much the same.

[Rasta Monsta]

Originally posted by euan


There's no reason to cry when we know we pissed in it!

ROFLMAO

[Rasta Monsta]

Isn't that interesting. . .I turned this option on after following a link from here (or Max Reboot) about "Tweaking Win XP Memory Settings," which came out about the same time as the new drivers.

Wouldn't it be ironic if a number of peeps followed the same link, made the same change, and blamed the drivers???

I think we have found a new rule. . .DON'T TURN ON LARGE CACHE.

Freakin' M$!

[JLP]

I had the same problem. I had large system cache turned on and was using recommended drivers and all worked just fine for days. Then I wanted to try the newest alternate drivers and after I installed them couldn't boot into WinXP even using safe mode. As I was thinking to make a fresh install of WinXP anyway I just did that. When setup was showing the list of partitions all NTFS partitions were shown as Unknown. So I think setup of new drivers did something to partitions and corrupt them or something.

Here is my system spec:
Abit KT7A-RAID
AMD Athlon C 1333/133
512 MB PC133 CAS2 RAM
ATI Radeon 8500
Adaptec AHA-2940 U2W SCSI adapter
1x 8GB IBM harddrive on VIA chipset
2x DTLA 3070330 in RAID-0 on HPT370
Waitec WT624 SCSI CDR on Adaptec
Pioneer 303S on Adaptec
3com 3c905b-TX NIC
Hercules Game Theater XP soundcard

[htyei]

This is just to confirm,

I started having major problems after followthing those tweaks at maxreboot.


Especially when I tried to have my pagefile in the second hardrive,
started giving me all sorts of "cannot write errors"

[Neptune755]

same here. i followed that SAME tweak and it screwed up. i was the one who posted teh first thread. the MODs closed, eveyone thought i was crazy. another person came forward with the same prob and then more people kept coming forward. they all thought i was crazy, but i was right.

good day gentlemen.

[billharris44]

Well, if it wasn't so annoying this would be kind of funny. It looks like a bunch of us tried that tweak for system cache from the same article and it blew us all up. I hope that guy knows how much trouble he's caused!

[Nascar24]

Originally posted by wlp5
Same thing happened to me on a friend's new pc I helped him set up. It has nothing to do with smoothvision. The usual suspect is behind it VIA (which I'm gueesing you're using), probably KT266.

What to do
1) Boot from the XP CD. Go to recovery console. You won't be able to see your hard disk, but go to the cd dir \i386. Use chkdsk.exe and if needed fixmbr.exe too (usually the first one does the job). Reboot and your hard disk will be as you left it, no need to enter safe mode or load previous configuration.
2) Remove IDE TOOL. This is the wource of the problem.... I'm talking about the seperate utility that lately came out by VIA. Instead use the default XP drivers for HD controllers

In fact the problem may appear after many reboots after you've installed IDE Tool, but I'm sure it's the one, because my friend fixed it (like above) once per day and after we removed IDE-Tool it's stable for a month now.

Hope that helps....

Yep sure enough that is what happened to me as well installing that dam new IDE driver. Ticked me off. I wish I would have known the stuff you mentioned here before I reformated about a month ago. Wasted alot of dam time reinstalling the whole dam system from scratch.

[Rasta Monsta]

bump