I have a Dell latitude d820 laptop with a Hitachi Travelstar 100GB SATA HD (MODEL: HTS721010G9SA00).
Windows XP Professional OEM SP2.

Before you shoot me, I've read the FAQ, and searched the forum, and i've not found the solution to my problem, so please read the whole thing before jumping to conclusions. I've also done alot of googling and calling of the Microsoft helplines and i've yeilded nothing.

Recently I dropped the laptop from about 4.5 feet while it was on, and it bluescreened. I didn't get the error code but i'm sure it had something to do with my hard drive coming out. But that isn't the problem. After that incident, i popped the hard drive back in, it booted fine, operated without incident, went into standby and hibernate modes and CAME back up fine. Three days later, the last time i shut it down, I had a file open in Notepad which was unsaved, and when i went to shut down my computer, the shut down stopped to wait for Notepad to respond to the kill message while Notepad asked me if I wanted to save whatever document I was working on. I selected 'Yes' and almost simultaneously windows decided to kill Notepad. Right before the computer finished shutting down I got an error message saying something about an application failing to initialize, though I couldn't read it because windows killed it nearly immediately as it came up.

Windows hasn't booted since. The next time i tried to boot the computer, instead of getting the windows logo, i got alot of black and white TEXT telling me that windows failed to load properly last time i started it, Which was odd, since it hadn't done anything of the sort. I selected 'Start Windows Normally' and got
UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME
0x000000ED (0x86EA6900, 0xC000009C, 0x00000000, 0x00000000),
after watching my Windows logo and loading bar for 10 seconds.

Repeating the process for Last Known Good Settings (Your Last Known Settings That Worked) and each of the three Safe Mode flavors yeilded the same error message, with the only variance being the last four characters of the 0x86EAXXXX.

Using the CD provided by Dell with the Operating System on it (WinXP Pro OEM) i've started the Recovery Console quite a few times. Executed Fixboot, Fixmbr, Chkdisk (/p /r and sans parms) in the various ORDERS perscribed by the help articles i'd found and yeilded no solution.

Fixmbr executes in 0 seconds and says success, but does nothing as far as i can see, when I attempt to load windows via any of the options i'm presented with at start up, it goes to the windows loading logo screen, waits around 10 seconds, and then bluescreens with the above error.

Fixboot always claims that my file system is corrupt and writes a default NTFS boot sector to my hard drive, again with the loading and the 10 seconds of logo and the bluescreen.

Chkdsk without parameters says "the volume appears to be in good condition and so was not checked", with /p it says "Chkdsk is doing additional checking or recovery..." three times in rapid succession, climbs at a lugubrious pace towards 4%, rockets off to 22%, climbs rather slowly again to 25% and then promptly informs me that "the volume appears to contain one or more unrecoverable errors". With /r Chkdsk repeats the process but finds unrecoverable errors at 50% instead. This of course, does not change the symptoms of my bootup bluescreen process.

I tried to examine my disk to see if i could recover my files by using a dir command at C: and retreived an "error during enumeration of directory structure". Undaunted, i attempted to cd into "Windows" which I know exists, and retreived "path or filename is invalid".

Needless to say, there are un-backed-up files on my hard drive which are of incredible importance to me, or I would've formatted it already.By the looks of things, you have done something seriously bad to your Hard Disk. I dont like your chances of retrieving any files from it.... I also think your hard drive is a goner.

You can try to remove the hard drive and connect it to another machine as a slave drive to see if you can get at your files. Also you can try to run repairs from a good system onto the slave drive. I think it may run them a little better that way and actually do something.
The laptop may have suffered other damage from the shock and the drive may not be as bad as it sounds...
2.5" to IDE converter:



10 Bucks at any Computer Store.
This will LET you hook up that drive to any desktop machine and retrieve your Data.
Be prepared well in advance...you may only get one shot at it. Because of this possibility i suggest COPYING disk to disk instead of attempting to burn it as the transfer speeds will be much greater.

It can always be burned later
Make sure the drive/partition you intend to copy to is about 1.5 to 2 times the total size of the laptop drive just in case...

Good Luck and we'll cross our collective fingers for you.The drive certainly isn't a goner, this is evident from the fact that the bootloader bootstraps correctly, all of the .sys files load up without a problem, and I see the windows logo along with the loading bar, and the images are not perturbed in any way. It looks like a completely normal boot process. This almost certainly couldn't be the case, and it almost certainly wouldn't give me the /exact/ same error codes every time if the hardware were malfunctioning, would it?Quote from: patio on May 16, 2008, 09:04:53 AM

The laptop may have suffered other damage from the shock and the drive may not be as bad as it sounds...
2.5" to IDE converter:



10 Bucks at any Computer Store.
This will let you hook up that drive to any desktop machine and retrieve your Data.
Be prepared well in advance...you may only get one shot at it. Because of this possibility i suggest copying disk to disk instead of attempting to burn it as the transfer speeds will be much greater.

It can always be burned later
Make sure the drive/partition you intend to copy to is about 1.5 to 2 times the total size of the laptop drive just in case...

Good Luck and we'll cross our collective fingers for you.