blue screen of death

guys I am working with a dell xps 410 it boots up fine until it hits the login and takes a ****. some ware between the windows loading screen and the login screen it goes to the blue screen the error message says something like unable to mount disk volume but when i start it in safe mode it works fine. Now i was thinking virus so i scanned it with ad-ware and mcafee both with the latest signatures and nothing came up. then i tried to disable all startup programs and it tells me i do not have the permissions to do that that i must log into and admin account before those changes can be made but I am logged in as an admin I am gonna try a Linux boot disk now and see if it finds any thing. Any one have any ideas?


thank you,
Riot

I believe dell has built in diagnostics, try tapping the different F keys while it is booting... it seems like it might be F12 that will pull up a boot menu for diagnostics, etc. In fact here is a link that will guide you through getting the diags to run:

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~deke/lapto.../d600/diag.htm

I would run through that just to make sure there is not a hardware issue.

Obviously a windows machine???

Version?? 2000,XP (does vista BSOD??)

Any new hardware installed recently?

Just dealt with some camera software crashing a 2000 machine....recently installed a new camera and software that came with it

Removed all the software that came with the camera...machine stopped crashing.



If the machine boots into safe mode....check the event log.

Sounds like a bad driver....or buggy software.

MLF

o sorry its windows xp pro media, nope no new hardware. but i will take a loot at the driver but they should be up to date.

and the exact error message is Unmountable_disk_volume. I am running the diagnostics now hope fully it will find the problem.

Could be a bad hdd. Try running "chkdsk /r c:" from safe mode and it will run on reboot. Dell's diags would pick that up too.

If the hard drive does come up with bad sectors I would recommend running Spinrite if you can get your hands on it. It's a bit expensive ($90). It's worth buying if you work with a lot of hard drive issues. Also, I wouldn't trust a "clean" result from McAfee or Norton, even with current signatures. I've cleaned many PCs that they deemed clean. The free version of AVG is much better for no cost. But from your description I tend to think it's most likely a disk error, not software. Probably startup or driver data on a bad sector. A repair install may also fix the problem if it's just a corrupted system file.

yea i was running some diagnostics and there is a problem with the hdd, now only to figure out how to fix it. I would just do a clean reinstall but before I do that I need to try and fix it because this computer dose have some important that the owner did not back up. also now it will not even let me login in safe mode with out crashing.

Hey Riot,

If you are getting HDD errors then I would slave it to a working machine and save what you can while you can.

Sure, there is software that can recover apparently bad drives (sometimes) but I would still save the data first. If the drive really is failing, each time you use it you cause more damage.

At any rate given the cost of HDDs these days, and the fact that I could never trust it again, I would recommend replacing it.

:)

Nihil's right. Bag the HDD. I've seen chkdsk repair bad sectors
and then had the HDD run fine...for awhile. It's hardware. It's
going bad, it's not going to get better. At best, it will work for
a while longer. Worst case scenario, not one to be ignored, is
it dies tomorrow and you never recover any data on there.

the hdd totally craped out i cant get to it all all. so i through in a Linux boot disk and got a portable hdd and am just gonna transfer what i can save.

I can't remember where I heard this, and it may have been a dream, but it seems like I heard that you can put the drive in a ziplock bag in the freezer, and have some more luck retrieving data off of it...

actually I googled 'freeze hdd' and got this:

http://geeksaresexy.blogspot.com/200...over-data.html

haven't read it yet, but you might look through it... anyone heard anything about this?

Yar!, I've tried the freezer trick before. A few times. It fails more often
than not.

The two go-to apps for me for data recovery are 1) SpinRite and 2) Disk
Commander, part of ERD 2005 boot disk. Spinrite works well if the partition
is intact. If the partition is fuber'ed, SpinRite chokes. Disk Commander
works on disks with corrupted partitions sometimes. I've got two disks
I'm working on now before deciding to send them out. Am going to give
Parted Magic (open source) before doing so.

In my experience it all depends on what the problem is caused by. Where files have been accidentally deleted or the file table or MBR have been screwed up then there are tools that might help.

Here is a free one:

http://www.pcinspector.de/Sites/file...htm?language=1

a commercial one would be Active@

Where you have physical damage then it is more problematic. Unstoppable Copier by roadkil is the one I go for................. it takes a long time, but it does the best job, as it attempts to reassemble the original files, damaged or not.

http://www.roadkil.net/downloads.php

Check out the data recovery section.............. there are Linux and Windows versions :)

The freezer and spinning techniques sometimes work when the disks have become stuck. However this is no help if the motor has burnt out, the heads have crashed, or the drive's controller card has blown.