Unmountable boot volume

[maureen]

Hi.Ive just bought an Msi K7N2 Delta.With a 3000 Athalon chip a 200gb Sata hd and 2 strips of pc3200 512 DDR Dane-elec.I installed everything fine but the machine was very unstable.I kept getting errors and it kept re booting.I narrowed it down to the strips of memory.If i took one out and left one in it ran fine and let me install some of my programs and then i left it running all night.Fine.Thought i would swap the two memory sticks to make sure it was that.It worked fine and let me instal the rest of my programs and left it running the following night.Fine.The boards manual says to put the memory in 1+3 or 2+3 with the 3 being the bank on its own.So i tried both options and the machine becomes unstable again.The last time it crashed i thought i'll put it back to one strip, at least it was running ok.
But now when ive tried to re-boot it crashes straight away and i get a blue error screen with unmountable boot volume.Ive tried booting into safe mode but get the same message.Ive changed the first boot device to cdrom and boot from the win xp disk but it wont.
What have i done wrong and what can i do to fix it?.

[DVD_Ripper]

I know it shouldn't matter but is memory from the same manufacturer?

Do you think it could be a glitch in the MB itself. Maybe a massive round of burn in tests are in order. Aside from the normal testing tools I've used "Hot CPU Tester 4" to test everything from memory to overnite burn in tests on CPU's.

Did the MB mfg provide any diags you can use. Are you using any RAM for a onboard video card? maybe try to disable.

Good Luck... Murphy loves computers

[gmatov]

Do you have access to a 98 boot disk? Do you have a floppy drive? (More machines are coming out without floppy connector>

If you have, run fdisk and check to see the HDD information. Just choose the numbered option for Show drive information. See if you have an Active partition and the file format.

I have had a number of machines that lost the MBR or something to the C drive, would not boot, Illegal drive format or something.

I've never heard of an "Unmountable" drive in a Win machine, that is a Linux/Unix term.

Another alternative is if you have Norton on the other machine, install the new drive on it and run Disk Doctor. No guarantee it will work, but I have had it find and fix lost partitions. May do the same for you.

Why Slots 1 and 3? I thought these new boards used matched RAM in 1 and 2 for the Quad thing, 1 and 3 for non Quad.

Cheers,

George