I've been leaving my laptop on a lot lately downloading large files, and the other night I returned to find it frozen. So I turned it off, and when I restarted it, it boots until the XP screen, then it stays there for longer than usual, then gives a message UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_PARTITION. From what I gather, this is the result of bad sectors on the HDD? Or not? I am going to do a complete reformat and install, but I have a LOT of work on the HDD that I don't want to loose - I am able to get into Windows Recovery Console using the XP install cd-rom, can anyone give me some details about using this to backup my files onto an external HDD or something before I do so? Or any other way of salvaging my data before I reformat? Thanks.

Do you have access to a desktop system? If so remove the laptop harddrive and get a suitable adaptor so you can slave the laptop drive into the desktop system. This may not work particularly if the drive is faulty but is a starting point. I used to have a signature but it disappeared and I just couldn't be bothered writing another so please feel free to ingore this.

"Or any other way of salvaging my data before I reformat?" Forget reformatting and focus on data recovery, I also doubt slaving it to another drive will automatically give you access to the drive without some kind of third party recovery tool like GetDataBack, Disk Commander, R-tools and a gob of others. At this point, it looks like your drive is defective. Computer Components

Try here. http://www.techtips4u.com/kb/sw/SW00014.htm Also google to the unmountable boot partition problem. There are numereous responses to it. TechRepublic has a good one. http://computervitals.com/

Also take a look here. http://computervitals.com/forum/showthread.php?t=5098

Do you try fixboot in Windows Recovery Console?