BSOD in XP install,"Unmountable_boot_volu me"

[Sanfam]

So once again, I return from the abyss. And with me comes a damned stubborn beast of a problem.

In the attempt to build a new old system for my girlfriend, the shiny new computer made of mostly new components seems to have hit a stumbling point. Before the XP installation process reaches the stage requiring user input of any sort (that is, prior the stage of selecting the drive on which to install to) and almost immediately following the display of "Starting Setup" (or the equiv. text in the bottom left corner), a friendly BSOD appears stating "Unmountable_boot_volume."

The system specs are as follows:
Asus K8V-X, BIOS revision 1012
AMD Sempron 3000+
1gb G-Skill RAM (DDR-400)
Seagate 320GB SATA HD, factory fresh
PNY GeForce 3 Ti500

Now, the problem would seem to be the SATA HD, or at least the SATA controller, but I've been looking into that route as best I can and have tried the following:

1. Install to SATA, no extra drivers
2. Install to SATA, via drivers
3. Install to SATA with EIDE drive present, no drivers
4. Install to SATA with EIDE drive present, via drivers
5. Install after resetting BIOS to factory defaults
6. Install to EIDE, no other HDDs connected
7. Additional variation of any of the above steps with two independent Installation CDs (XP SP1, XP SP2)

To make matters more interesting, I've been able to get well into the installation of Mac OS X with no problem thus far and have been able to interface with the drive in GParted and an Ubuntu LiveCD. This just makes no sense to me from a troubleshooting standpoint. The single point of error seems to be the XP installation process itself. My suspicion is that the installer is just plain not detecting a storage controller of any sort and thus unable to continue, bumping it out and into the chain of normality. But something doesn't sit well with me in regards to that particular assumption.

I'm confused, and until this gets going, my girlfriend is going to continue being out of a system! I am thoroughly baffled and now turn to you, oh [h]ard ones.

 

[unhappy_mage]

Is there a setting for "MBR virus protect" or something like that in the BIOS? That could make the changing of the partition table and installation of the bootloader fail... Long shot, but all I can think of.

On the plus side, there's no time like the present to try out Ubuntu

 

[Sanfam]

I return with updates.

Today's experiment was a simple substitution of the source drive for installation. I tried a known-good DVD/CD-RW combo drive. Lo and behold, it worked! Went right on through with no problems. We'll see how much further it gets with time, but no problems thus far and a far more rapid install of OSX, to boot.

For the record, my alternate plan for installation was to get OSX in place and then use parallels to give the girlfriend access to windows XP. It probably would have been a fairly good configuration, too. But now, we'll at least have one working OS.