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[Ehcanadian]

Hey Folks,

Bought a Gateway ID49c01h from futureshop last year.

Two things happened around the same time:

I reformatted the laptop because it was getting slow, and instead of scanning it and cleaning it, and potentially leaving an undetected deadly virus, reformatting seemed like a great idea.

Second: Not too soon after reformat, it was dropped.

I received the BSOD a few times, and then the laptop would restart. I was hoping it wouldn't have to do anything because of the drop. I reformatted again to make sure everything was installed properly. The second time around it was running great again, but then at one point, windows explorer crashed. I had to force shut off the laptop because of windows explorer crashing. After this, the laptop would not go past the windows 7 startup logo, after which I would receive a BSOD "Unmountable boot drive" error. 

I was trying to reinstall windows 7 again, hoping it's not hardware. Windows 7 install would not go past the 2nd screen (format hard drive) with the mouse pointer stuck on the 'loading' icon.

Any ideas? Should I bring it in to futureshop to have it fixed?

Thanks!

[Tanarus]

An 'unmountable boot volume' means one of two things -- either the boot sector on the drive is corrupted, which can typically be fixed by software scans or a reformat, or the hard drive itself is failing. Because it sounds like you're unable to even format the drive, I'd lean towards this being a problem with the hard drive itself.

Does the laptop still have any warranty coverage? The hard drive may be replacable under the warranty, if it can be deemed that the drop didn't cause it to fail. Otherwise, the hard drive can be replaced by any 2.5" SATA hard drive, and installed by Future Shop's technicians, if necessary. Future Shop sells a number of Western Digital Scorpio laptop hard drives for laptops.

[Ehcanadian · Accepted solution]

Solved: I decided I'd put the old hard drive back in. My friend had an external hard drive case which was left open and connected to his computer. He had attached my old hard drive to it yesterday to see if it would work, and it wouldn't, so he formatted it through My Computer, but it still would run slow. After I placed it back in my laptop last night, I ran a windows cd in it and it installed succesfully.

Over 16 hours and no bsod, it's running smoothly. Tested Battlefield Bad Company 2 and it ran without any problems. 

Before I hadn't reformatted the laptop completely, I just set it back to factory settings, perhaps Gateway's software was corrupted? Or corrupted by a virus before going back to factory settings?

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(My original response)

Hey,

Thanks for the reply. Got the hard drive replaced by a friend who knows how to repairs computers since it was a small job. Windows loads now, but still get a blue screen. Sometimes I get a black screen saying 'no bootable device' and to insert a bootable device and press enter. 

A few times it asked me to insert an operating cd to do repairs. Inserted a windows cd, went to repair (which was not possible before on the old hard drive). It could not repair and I clicked on diagonstics to see the report: It couldn't find a hard drive.

I'll probably bring it in to a futureshop soon.

thanks