Unmountable boot volume

[Hades1]

I am currently trying to fix a friends laptop, it crashed while in use.

Upon restart was met with stop code :- Unmountable boot volume. It is a HP Notebook, Model - 15 ba079na.

I have followed a lot of hp suggestions on fixes, none of which has worked.

When it starts up, screen has the HP logo with the dotted wheel spinning underneath. Then it pops up with the stop code as mentioned above. It then restarts and gets stuck on "Preparing automatic repair.

To date:- I have tried, booting from usb and windows iso disk. System repair (F11), BIOS update, will not boot into safe mode (F8). Have done the long extensive checks on hard drive which all came back as passed.

Run out of things to try that i have found online.

Coming to the conclusion it's going to be a hard drive replacement.

Any Suggestions?

[geekygal72]

You could try booting from a linux live disk. I used Ubuntu on a HP laptop a few days ago.

[WAWood]

@Hades1

First off, it's unlikely a Linux disk will help in your case, since Win10 has a new form of hibernation enabled BY DEFAULT, and when this is the case, the filesystem remains mounted -- even when Windows is not running.  That will prevent Linux from mounting the drive and will given an error message to that effect.

Second, you said you tried several things and, I guess, they all did not work:

1) Booting from USB stick -- what happened?

2) Booting from Windows ISO disk -- did you simply copy the ISO file to the disk? IF so, that will not work.

3) F11 - what happened when you did this.  Did you get any kind of menu?

4) BIOS Update -- ??

If your PC is new enough to support UEFI, you can use these steps to test the hard drive: http://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c00439024
 
If not, you have to follow these steps:
1) Press Esc key repeatedly, several times a second, while rebooting the laptop. Do NOT hold the key down, just press it over and over.
2) Eventually, you will see an HP Startup Menu -- that will look similar to the image below ...

3) press the Function key for testing the hard drive (usually F2) and let it run.
 
Please report back the test results.

[geekygal72]

FWIU, linux live can run just from media (USB drive, DVD) and RAM and doesn't try to mount the HDD (unless the user wants it to).

[Hades1]

1) Booting from USB did nothing.

2) Windows ISO, on start up got the usual message of press any key to boot from cd/dvd drive. When chosen it doesn't do anything and will eventually pop up with the same stop code (unmountable boot drive).

3) When selecting F11, goes to a black screen then eventually will come back with the same stop code and restart into "preparing automatic repair".

4) Bios update/check was a suggestion from HP support topics when searching the issue.

System diagnostics has already been done, both quick and extensive. Everything came back as passed.

As suggested by the other person, already tried using ubuntu, but same result as windows usb, does nothing.

[Hades1]

Tried ubuntu from usb, does not run. But thank you for the suggestion.

[geekygal72]

Did you try ubuntu live? It runs only from the USB drive/DVD and RAM. Doesn't access the HD.

[WAWood]

@geekygal72

I understand that -- as I have been using Linux distros daily for well over a decade -- but most folks boot into a Linux distro to open the Windows filesystem and access their files.  This USED to work just fine, until MS decided to ENABLE hibernation by default in Win10 and prevent this from working anymore.

And yeah, you can FORCE the reading of the Windows filesystem in Linux, but that corrupts the filesystem, making it impossible to then boot back into Windows.

So, with the advent of Win10, booting into Linux has become relatively useless.

[geekygal72]

I just booted into ubuntu live from DVD on a Win 10 64x HE box. Then booted back into Windows and all appears well. 🙂