I have an old HP Pavilion that used to be my mom's pc, and it is coming up with an UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUMNE message. Is there any way to access the information on it, or is it just dead as a doornail?
It 'could' be bad. Never know though. http://209.167.114.38/support/TechSupport/TSBs/ALL/-TSB001055.htm
Well, I would take that error message to mean that the boot sector is bad. But you don't need the boot sector to access it as a slave. Put it in as a secondary drive with the selector set to auto or slave and you might be able to access it - likely you could at least run a file system check if necessary if the file system is damaged. If it doesn't mount that way, go to the manufacturer web site and check out any utilties they have for drive integrity, and run them against the slave. That will tell you if it's dead as a doornail, or as Miracle Max said 'mostly dead is still partly alive.'
