Unmountable Book Disk Failure
 

After half a year of waiting I was finally able to get my new computer built, eventually.

I've been sitting on a legit version of XP Pro (32bit) and after formatting the hard drive it decides to say "unmountable book disk" after restarting.

I burned the XP Pro (32bit) disk again since it came from an MSDNAA iso and this time I used a better CD than before.

Did the whole thing again and it actually worked and now I'm left with one question: What would of caused this problem in the first place if the disk was NOT the problem? I'm thinking my RAM (4Gigs) might be it but I'm not sure.

Thought I might ask everyone else to see if there might have been another explanation.

Crap can always happen when installing... especially windows.

There could have been a slight CD read error, or write error when burned. Or Windows could have decided to puke on the insides of your 'puter. Who knows. BIOS and chipsets vary so much, sometimes Windows installs quirky.

All in all, I wouldnt lose sleep over it. You should be fine with the install you just did.

Most of the time when I see this problem arise it's either because of a bad hard drive on an existing install or bad RAM when trying to install.

I'd recommend getting memtest86 onto a CD and run it to test your RAM, then get a hardware diagnostic program from your HDD manufacturer and run that afterwards. Since you installed Windows successfully, odds are that whatever problems exist will be minor and not threatening to your system.

By formatting your HDD, it is now empty and not bootable. I mean, what do you expect the hard disk to boot to if you have no data on it? You have to boot from your CD/DVD-ROM drive by either choosing the optical drive as the first boot device in the BIOS or if you motherboard supports the feature you can press F9 during the POST process to get a boot menu and choose the CD/DVD rom drive from the list.

The copy of Windows you burned also has to be a bootable image file.

On a side note, I'm rather curious as to why so many people tend to suggest solutions to worst case scenario first so often on these boards.

The problem I found after coming home from work is that Windows won't boot-up correctly anymore. It takes 4-5 reset attempts before actually getting into Windows now.




Thanks for the link, I will trying that program out soon.




I found that the discs I used to burn the first Windows XP disc was of bad quality and tried a better quality disc to burn the ISO and worked!

Plus its always good to know the worst case scenario as it helps plan against it happening in the future.

In that case, it would be a good idea to run Memtest. Is the system stable once it's running? Most cold boot problems seem to be related to memory or motherboard issues of one type or another.

I wouldn't be surprised if you're probably running into some sort of dumb Windows or driver bugs, though. If you're using an nForce chipset (not sure why you'd want to put up with nVidia weirdness on an Intel box, to be honest) don't ever install the IDE drivers, since they tend to cause this exact type of problem with a lot of optical drives.

You have the second best avatar here, BTW. ^^