Unmountable boot volume error in Vista.

My brother (who lives thousands of kilometers away) called me last night with a problem he's been having with his computer for the last few days.

He has an Acer aspire5315, running Windows Vista Basic.

He gets a blue screen every time he starts up his computer. He gets as far as seeing the Microsoft Corporation text with the loading bar and then he gets the blue screen. It doesn't get to load his desktop or anything, so he can't do anything.
I've told him to restart in safe mode (hitting F8 on startup), but the computer simply makes a few loud beeps and then returns a black screen.

Here's the error message that he gets:

I can't get my hands on this computer (as I said before, we're very far away from each other. In different countries.) So what I can do is very limited. I'm not even sure if this is a software or hardware problem.
This has been happening for the last few days he says. He did not install anything new (as far as he can remember) and did not drop or damage the computer in anyway.
Thanks for the help.

 

My wild guess is that your brother's comp hard drive is failing.

cheers ...

 

Yeah I'm starting to think it's a hardware problem...
The computer's not even a year old though.

 

I have seen that many times, sadly, even on systems less than 6 months old. Most of the times, one can be lucky just to reinstall the OS and then run a good chkdsk afterward.

Good luck.

cheers ...

 

Boot from Vista DVD. Run Recovery Console and check for corruption with chkdsk and fixboot.

 

He does not have a Vista DVD. He says he never got one with the computer. So it probably came with a recovery partition, or he had a DVD and lost it.

 

Have him try the Vista Recovery Disc (ISO). Has some of the same tools as the regular DVD.
http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,71039/description.html
Have used it to correct boot troubles and other issues.