I had the same problem, but managed to create a work around. try the following:
1. start XP in safe mode, do this by pressing f8 just before xp loads and select 
safe mode.
2. goto device manager, right click My Computer select properties click hardware 
and then Device Manager.
3. open "IDE ATA/ATAPI controlers.
4. duble click "Primary IDE Channel"
5. select "Advance Settings" tab.
6. Change "Transfer Mode" from "DMA" to "POI" on the hard drive that XP is loaded 
on, e.g. on my PC XP is loaded on "Device 0".
7. click "Ok", close all windows and restart XP.
i'm still looking for the reason and mybe an answer as 2 y XP is doing this.






On Monday, December 16, 2002 at 9:15 am, Michael Lees wrote:
>
>Hi all,
>
>Phew am I glad I found this thread! My problems started a few weeks back after buying 
>a new computer with new HD. I installed XP and everything seemed to be okay. That 
>was until one day, while XP was booting I switched my USB (music) keyboard on. All 
>of a sudden UNMOUNTABLE_VOLUME was displayed and XP wouldn't load. So I used the 
>CD to load the recovery console and ran chkdsk, XP booted and I thought everything 
>was okay. Once XP loaded I ran chkdsk and it was reporting bad sectors on the drive! 
>I assumed I'd been given a bad HD by maxtor so I went to their website to return 
>the drive. Maxtor have a piece of software called powermax which you can download. 
>They use it to certify their drives and remove bad sectors after construction.
>I downloaded this and performed a low-level format and certified the drive. It was 
>coming up okay? So I re-installed XP, while XP was formating the drive (NTFS) it 
>complained saying the partition was too small. When I looked XP had partitioned 
my 
>drive in two, an 8Meg partition and a 40Gig partition? I have no idea why this happened 
>but I installed XP on the 40 Gig partition and everything seemed okay. Now ultra-paranoid 
>of my drive I found myself running chkdsk every 10 minutes. I grew even more concerned 
>when the drive was constantly indicating minor errors, I assumed it was some indication 
>that a major error was about to happen? However upon further inspection I realised 
>the error reporting was completely inconsistent! I'd run chkdsk in the command prompt 
>window (read-only mode) and it would report errors suggesting I re-run chkdsk with 
>/f option. However if I then ran chkdsk again immediately afterwards (without the 
>/f option) still in the command prompt, chkdsk would report no problems? Obviously 
>the error can't have been fixed if chkdsk was in read-only mode so obviously the 
>error wasn't ever there?
>
>After further investigation I've realised chkdsk seems to report spurious errors 
>about the volume bitmap? What the hell is going on?? Perhaps the reason there isn't 
>more news on this is people never run chkdsk manually, they rely on XP to check 
for 
>drive inconsistencies on booting?
>

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