HP desktop will not boot

[fredwen]

I have a Pavilion Elite desktop model m 9500f purchased in 2009.  It came with Vista but had Windows 10 installed a few months ago.  Everything worked fine until it suddenly shut down while watching a movie.  It would not reboot.  Auto repair from a blue screen did not work.  It has a diagnostic program that reported things are working, including CPU, Memory and Hard Drive.  I was not able to get a detailed error code/explanation that I think would be available working from the command prompt on newer HP models.  A blue screen did tell me "unmountable boot volume".  I could not rebuild the boot configuration data from the command prompt.  When I entered bootrec /Fix Mbr, for example, it told me "the system cannot find the path specified".  When I typed in bootrec /Rebuild Bcd it told me  "total identified Windows installations: 0".  I tried to reinstall Windows 10 from the original Windows 10 USB.  The installation failed when a location/drive could not be identified for installation.

Somebody on another web site had a similar problem and was told he would have to rebuild the entire system partition.  That person was able to do a clean reinstall of the operating system and I guess avoided the problem.  I am wondering if I have to "rebuild a partition" (which is beyond my ability).  I am looking for possible solutions and help.

[Prométhée · Accepted solution]

hi

can you remove the hard drive, and connect it to another computer?
If so, do it, see if you have access to the content
Recover what is possible
format it, put it back in the computer, and try a complete installation again

[fredwen]

I do have another computer available and can work on this.  Will probably take me a few days to complete.

[fredwen]

The steps worked:  took the hard drive out and temporarily attached it to another HP computer (all the wire connectors matched), formatted the drive using windows 10 on the temporary computer, returned the drive to its original computer and did clean install of windows 10.   No problems encountered.

[Prométhée]

😉