Troubleshooting a hard drive. Keywords: XP, repair, Symantec, drive letter, shutdown, NTFS, live CD.

I tried to troubleshoot a Dell computer with the Windows XP media center edition. Windows appears to be starting up, but it reaches the welcome screen and stays there. I tried booting from a Symantec recovery disc from a Norton Systemworks Premier package in hopes of restoring the most recent settings, but the software couldn't see the hard drive. I tried to repair the installation with a Windows XP OS CD, but it didn't seem to see the hard drive, either. I thought I could at least leave an Ubuntu Linux live CD so the owner could access the Internet, and after it loaded, it could see the hard drive. I tried to click on the main partition, and the following error message was displayed:

Cannot mount volume.

Unable to mount the volume.

Details

$LogFile indicates unclean shutdown (0,0) Failed to mount '/dev/sda2': Operation not supported Mount is denied because NTFS is marked to be in use.

There was more, but I'm running out of space. Is there any way to get back into Windows as it was?

Troubleshooting a hard drive. Keywords: XP, repair, Symantec, drive letter, shutdown, NTFS, live CD.?ariel

try installing the ubuntu on it. see if that works. Also make sure it's the new version 7.10, which can read and write to ntfs partitions, prevoious versions could only read, not write. This will allow you to get any unbacked up data off of it, with any luck, then you can try a windows clean install. If all else fails, just get a new drive, they've never been cheaper.