is this the end?

[merlyn]

Does the BSOD give a clue as to which driver is causing the problem?

The image Oliver21 posted was visible earlier and the error was

UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME

You may be able to shed some light on that.

[Rockrooms]

Does the BSOD give a clue as to which driver is causing the problem?

The image Oliver21 posted was visible earlier and the error was

UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME

You may be able to shed some light on that.

Well, as you might expect, this isn't something you want to see. Pretty much as it says, the master boot record on the current boot drive that the bios is pointing at is invalid, either due to physical sector damage, or is readable but invalid or is just plain missing.

If the drive is a spinning rust one and there's no obvious clicking, or start stop noises of the motor and you can hear the drive start up, it's possible that the data is still intact and you might be able to repair it. This is going to need a windows XP disc however and Oliver mentioned he didn't have one.

It's worth a check in the bios to see if it still recognizes the boot driver, but it sounds like the best bet is going to be getting the drive mounted on another machine.

The other remote possibility (and this doesn't normally happen without some deliberate intervention) for a very old machine is that there is a mismatch between the bios SATA config and a driver needed to access the drive, i.e you installed in ATA IDE mode and now it's trying to use ACHI with no driver on the partition, but this isn't something that would just happen, compared to a disk going bad.

Joe

[James Perrett]

One other thought as this is an XP era machine - if the machine has a CD or DVD drive you could always try the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows. I can make you a copy if you need it.

[BWC]

For problems with old spinning disk drives, there's also always: https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm