When loading windows XP on a known-good machine recently, windows
setup starts into the graphical portion (after the text-based initial
portion and an automatic reboot, all normal) and immediately brings up
a dialog box that says "A write operation was attempted to a volume
after it was dismounted" then immediately thereafter reboots.  This
message appears in a dialog with a red X for only about a tenth of a
second (multiple reboots confirmed the exact message).  I have loaded
XP on this machine and on these drives successfully before.  All the
manufacturer's hard disk diagnostics indicate that the drives are
fully operational, and I have even gone so far as to use utilities to
write zeros to the first 4% of one of the drives.

I need to find out what Microsoft's explanation is, and if there is a
particular fix for this issue, specifically as it relates to Windows
XP.  Why is the only hard drive in the system (IDE WD 800JB) being
dismounted before setup can continue? The MS knowledge base has a
description of this error as a Windows 2000 Executive STATUS, but the
indicated context seems irrelevant to my situtation, and certainly
doesn't indicate that this message would be related to an
unpreventable, instantaneous reboot.

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Clarification of Question by absterge-ga on 08 Sep 2004 19:54 PDT

Other possibly pertinent information:  When partitioning/formatting a
factory-fresh drive, everything works smoothly as expected.  When
connecting one of these drives that is acting funny on boot to another
IDE controller (Abit SA6R mobo, has 4 IDE controllers; in this case it
was the third controller), then suddenly the good drive starts acting
crazy like the old ones.  With the one guinea pig drive (the same
80Gb), I have used Partition Magic, Windows Recovery Console, and
various other 3rd party tools to zero-fill the drive (as described
prev.), and to create, delete, and format partitions.  All of these
things I have done to the one drive multiple times over, and still the
same problem.

I have disabled all seemingly related settings in BIOS (none of which
did I ever have to before, btw).  I build computers for a living, so I
do have some idea what I'm doing here, but I've never seen anything
like this, and my web search turned up nothing.

absterge,

For what it's worth...

I've seen that error twice before while building an XP machine. On one
occasion the memory was bad. I did everything in the BIOS, and with HD
diagnostics, but setup kept bombing with the dismount error. I
ultimately discovered that I had a bad DIMM. I replaced the DIMM and
setup completed. Later I discovered that the root of the problem was a
bad power supply that had damaged the DIMM and was causing many "write
operation" errors. The power supply was not giving enough power to the
mobo and the IDE controllers would stop functioning. Occasionally, the
PS would spike and damage anything in it's path.  I ended up having to
scrap the motherboard.

On a second occasion I had a bad CD Writer(brand new, but DOA). It
wreaked havoc on the IDE controller. I was able to install XP with
another CD ROM drive and had the CDRW replaced.

Like you, I found very little help on the web sites to help figure this out.

Hope this helps.

-tm

Y'know what Tim, that's probably worth more than you know.  I've had
these sneaking suspicions that I've either been dealing with bad RAM
or a bad PS, but there wasn't anything conclusive either way, and the
symptoms seemed to indicate something more direct, like HDD damage
or... something.  Something else, I guess.

I'll do some more swaps tonight between this PC and the other one. 
For the time being at least though, the question still stands.

Well, as it turns out, I swapped the memory and power supply with
known-good upgrades, and I still get the same behavior (although the
error message itself was different.  Something about insufficient
resources, something something API).  It's either the motherboard or
the CPU, and either way a specific answer to the question isn't going
to help, and would only be good for posterity (which isn't worth to me
what I've offered).  The question no longer stands.