[Desert.lynx]

A mate of mine has a fairly new Macbook which was, until recently, dual booting with bootcamp and windows.
I had done it for him as I have a MBP and had a little experience in setting up bootcamp, and that all worked fine for the better part of a month.
However, the other day he told me that his computer couldn't boot up windows. So I took it and tried booting up, here's what happened:

Windows automatically starts up, but goes to the safemode optional prompt, the keyboard doesn't respond so I have to wait until it times out
the usual windows XP logo appears
the blue error screen appears and gives the usual error message, notably that there is an "UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME" and some technical information in hex.

now this was odd, so I booted it into mac osx (took a while, but it worked) and noticed that the usual "untitled" windows partition was missing. upon starting up disk utility, I tried to mount the partition, but after asking for username/pwd, nothing happened.

The guy I'm doing this for is just a kid, he's savvy enough not to kill his computer with a virus or anything, but this strikes me as an unusual problem. unfortunatly he has data on the windows partition he would rather not loose, but unless others know an easy fix, I'm gonna have to delete the partition and re-install windows.

has anyone experienced this problem before?

[ibook_steve]

It's Windows running with beta (though good beta) software. Use Boot Camp assistant to start over. That'll be faster than trying to figure out what's wrong with the current installation. Can Disk Utility repair the partition?

Steve

[Desert.lynx]

I have to admit, I'm not sure what Disk utility could do, other than mount the partition and do a 'first aid' --> repair disk. (I'm primarily a windows user)

Unfortunately this is unavailable because the partition cannot seem to be mounted.

[Desert.lynx]

An additional problem has arisen, the keyboard refuses to work in the windows boot install cd menues.

Edit: sorry, stupid mistake, I wasn't using my XP slipstreamed disk

[ghporter]

It sounds like the Windows partition has been corrupted. Your friend WAS using an antivirus program, right? If not, he could have gotten a bug from the Internet that goofed up his system. It sounds like it's time to a) use the Boot Camp utility to wipe the Windows partition, b) Disk Utility to clean up/fix anything that happened to the Mac partition, and c) start over.