On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 1:30 PM, Thomas Rieff <trieff at greencaremankato.com>wrote: TCLUG, Been a while since I have had hard drive failures. This is on a windows xp machine in our office. Blue Screen Of Death with a Unmountable Boot Drive error. Hopefully, yes. Is the drive spinning? Did a cable get knocked loose? Any funny sounds (excessive clicking or strange new spinning noises)? Step 1: Shut down and unplug Step 2: Take drive out and give it a light (light!) smack on the table Step 3: Reassemble, check those cables, any change? Step 4 (uh oh, you got this far) Throw the drive in a freezer bag, give it a few hours Step 5: QUICKLY re-assemble while drive is still cold, any change? Step 6 (you have backups, right??) Grab a USB adapter and attach the drive to another machine. Since you mentioned a non-linux OS, I recommend using a PC that is also non-linux and grab a copy of On-track easyrecovery (free to download, only have to pay if you actually have something to recover). Scan and see if anything is even present. ~$150 or so if you're lucky enough to find something (contact me off list if you're here, I have some alternative tools that sometimes work if you don't want to pay, but they're not nearly as good as Ontrack). Step 7 (no backups? Oh....) Remove credit card from wallet. Make sure you have a good $K or two on there. Ontrack is very good, their price tag says so. Hopefully you get no further than step 5, but hard drives can be nasty buggers when they go bad. Best of luck! Brian -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20101112/b81ebbe8/attachment.htm