disc read error when booting

SERprise

SERprise

New Member
This PC has worked fine for 4 years then today I try to boot it and I get the disc read error, does that mean my hard drive went bad?? or could it be something else? I haven't done anything to the pc to cause it.. it has been sitting in the same spot for years.


specs:

Athlon 1700+ I believe, motherboard is a gigabyte (ga7dxr) I believe :) model # might be a bit off, been a loong time, 512mb of pc2100, gf3 TI200, 40gb IBM drive, XP as my OS. I know the computer is nothing special but I'm not ready to build a new one yet if this can be fixed for fairly cheap. I don't game on it or anything, just a word processor, email, surfin the net... It is perfect for what I do. Thanks for the help
 
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disk read error and it won't even boot?, or disk read error and i will still boot?, if it still boots i might be talking about your cd drive, if it won't boot it is possible your hard drive failed
 
If the master boot record or partition information was damaged somehow you can see error messages like this come up even on good drives. When was XP first installed? There are a few tricks for restoring an mbr if that is the only thing needing repair. When booting from the XP installation disk to the recovery console you can type in fixmbr and fixboot there and try restarting Window after. The other method is to use the old dos partitioning tool "FDisk" on a 98 or ME boot floppy and type "fdisk /mbr" at the dos prompt after booting from that if you have a floppy drive installed.

Sometimes the only thing that can save an older installation of XP is the repair install method outlined in tha article at http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

One other thing to consider on an older system is the lithium battery on the board itself. After a few years they often can become weak where the cmos information starts to degrade. Try a fresh battery before the repair methods. That will see the bios time and date screen come up on the first startup after for setting that along with any other settings. Unplug your case in the meantime if it has been sitting there undisturbed for all that time and take a can of compressed air to clean the dust and dirt from the inside. Fouled contacts due to buildup of dust and debris can also cause similar problems.
 
Often when any copy of Windows has been running for s few years the integrity of the system files degrades including mbr and partition information. I wipe a drive completely about twice a year to keep the fiile integrity for both system files and anything stored on the drive. This is why backing anything up to removable media on a some type of regular schedule can prevent a serious loss from a need to reformat or drive failure.

The first to try here before a repair install would be the repair of the mbr and boot record if possible. Inspect the drive cables as well. If those get dried out and stiff that can often cause problems with older systems.
 
This is an incredibly common problem with NTFS partitions and Windows XP.

Well, at least the Eye got one thing right. A bad cable can produce the problem you are talking about. However, everything else he got wrong. Fixboot and fixmbr aren't going to solve anything. It has nothing to do with the Master Boot Record or the partition table. You can try these things if you have plenty of time to waste, but that's all you'll be doing.

So, you need to do a few things. First step is to check the cables as PC Eye mentioned. It's a possibility.

Next, your motherboard has an AMD761 chipset. Good chipset by the way. I suspect the problem is with your VIA 686b southbridge and it's communication with the drive. I have a funny feeling they are out of sync. How you fix that, I honestly don't know. You could try updating your BIOS though. That won't hurt anything.

Go into your BIOS and reset values to default, then reboot.

Next step is to enable SMART in the BIOS. See if any warnings come up.

Step number next is to run the manufacturer's diagnostic tools on it.

Next step is to run chkdsk /f. I do have my doubts on this one but try it because the next step is a little more drastic.

The next step is to zero out the drive (doing a zero fill is a low level format).

Chances are these previous two will only generate a temporary fix. One day you'll go to shut it down and it will do the same damn thing all over again.

Final step is to RMA the drive.
 
A zero fill when a simple deletion of the current partition, creation and format of a new one, and the fresh installation of XP would see a system running? A repair install would go much faster in seeing if the drive was at fault then letting a drive zero fill for the length of time there.

For something that does a low level format in far less time that a zero filler try Active KillDisk found at http://www.killdisk.com/downloadfree.htm when someone there convinces you to wipe everything off of the drive first before making any attempt restore the drive at least long enough for data retrieval.
 
He can retrieve the data easily by going to http://www.bootdisk.com and downloading a boot disk that will allow him to view an NTFS partition and recover data off it. If my hunch is correct, though, it will come off corrupt. Only time will tell.

A fresh installation of XP will do squat. Trust me. Actually, I don't care if you do or don't trust me. It's not your computer that is having a problem, so think whatever you want.

Deletion, creation and formatting a partition will do jack squat. You obviously have no idea what the problem is here, the magnitude of the occurences, the solutions many have tried, nor have you done ANY research (which is somewhat unusual for you, even if it is completely off topic).

A zero fill is a last resort, and there are no shortcuts. If it comes to that, you MUST reset all bits to zero. End of story. Hopefully it never comes to that.
 
If SERprise knew someone with a Knoppix Live cd the drive there could be slaved in another case long enough to copy anything needed from it. Being that I am far from an IBM drive fan and the suspicion of the drive being on the way out spending the time to zero fill with anything would be pointless if no other techniques work even after replacement of the drive cable.

At this time you can grab a drive twice the size and use it there for the time being for a good price seen at http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822144122

As far as needing to zero out an old drive that has sitting around for years. I replaced a spent Seagate 1.2gb drive some years back with a WD 1.4gb drive that was just sitting around. That drive in still use at this time. The owner never bothered to upgrade to a newer system.

The only need for zero filling at this point in time is when you know a drive has a virus infection that nothing but a complete wipe will remove. That's where everything including the mbr and partition information has been corrupted. If the read heads went you will know fast when the XP installer doesn't have anything to go on or repartition.
 
Ok. I'll try to address your post an issue at a time.

Putting the drive in another computer might work, if the drive is not at fault. At this point we can't be sure, but based on the research I did for him I have my doubts that the drive is mechanically faulty.

Grabbing another drive does not solve the problem and shouldn't even be recommended as an alternative. I have read extensive reports on this issue and in many cases the use of a handful of drives ALL generated the same problem, indicating the fault certainly lay elsewhere.

I don't give a good goddamn about your Seagate or your other customer. I'm still surprised you have or had any.

Zero filling isn't necessarily indicated for virii infections. It can also be indicated for a drive that has become corrupt.

I don't know where the hell you got the idea of read heads going from, and I don't think I want to know. Obviously you don't have the first clue how a HDD works. Read heads are simply magnets. They either work or they don't. The only thing that can happen is that the head can "crash", or scrape across the platter. It won't just "not read the drive". :rolleyes: It will simply sound like somebody dragging a roofing nail across a brake rotor. He'll know it if that happens.
 
The plastic? What bloody plastic? There is no plastic on an arm. Take another look at those pictures. You REALLY need to get educated in computer electronics before you start spewing any more shit on here. You haven't got a CLUE what you're talking about. Have you ever even taken a drive apart? Somehow I doubt it, because you have no idea. You don't know one end of a HDD from the other.

The only thing that link tells us is that HDDs are susceptible to corrosion, forcing the head to stick to the platters... Uh.. Ok.. You'll hear the scraping when that happens unless it simply jams. If air pressure is not just right the heads will either bounce off the platters, usually taking a nice chunk out of them or they will drag along the platter. Yeah... I said that.

Magnetic dust. Uh. Yeah. Coupled with blue ooze... Air pressure problems. Harddrives are hermetically sealed, with the exception of one breather hole with a filter on it. So are the plants where they are made. Good luck getting dust inside one. In your example the heads crashed scraping all the crap off the platter. Which goes back to what I told you.

The space between a head and a platter is less than the thickness of a human hair. Sit and ponder that one for a while.

I can't believe people let you at their computers or believe anything you tell them. I really can't.
 
I don't have to ponder on anything microfinished since I already well too familiar with precision ground surfaces. Try 1/10,000 of an inch to start with just for the beginner. If you read the second link you would know right away what is the difference between a normal platter in a drive and one that was now "plastic".
"After popping out the first platter I realized that I was correct. The drive platter was now see through. It appears that the head crash scrubbed the drive so clean that the magnetic substrate has been wiped clean off the platters." http://www.astro.ufl.edu/~ken/crash/ "plastic" = non magnetic

"wwwwwoooorrrttttthhhhhhleeessssssssssss......."!
 
wow, lot of activity here. This particular pc is back home at my mom's house but I should have it back down here hopefully this weekend (this is stuff I have a feeling I wont be able to instruct her to do over the phone). If not this weekend definately the following weekend. files on it aren't a problem, nothing of any sort of importance is on it.

The drive was actually recently reformatted too, no more than 6 months ago, the pc wasn't booting right(can't remember what error it was... either stuck on verifying dmi or boot failure) so I reformatted it but it didn't fix it. It ended up just being the dvd drive went bad so I bought a new drive and all has been well since. it took me soo long to figure that out, I was wanting to just throw the pc away. I was thinking today since there was a bad cd drive before, maybe the power supply or motherboard is frying them?? I am going to call my mom tomorrow and have her first reset the bios to default and when that doesn't work(doubt it but gotta try it, easiest thing to do) I will then have her unplug the cd drive. I am hoping (to avoid a headache) the pc boots after unplugging the drive, that way I atleast know what the problem is. I'll go for a new power supply if that is the case because it would most likely be causing that wouldn't it? It is NTFS though, so it could have something to do with the hard drive, hopefully not a hardware issue. I'm not really brand specific with HD's, owned em all and good results with them all(IBM pending)That drive is a lot older than the 4 years it has been in "that" machine. I bought that thing back in 2001-2002 with an old Iwill board (what ever happened to them?? lol) and I don't remember, maybe a 1.4 TBird setup I had. That drive has lived a decent life so no complaints here. nowadays I have a Hitachi 7k100 drive in my notebook(yes I know that is IBM), 4 Hitachi sata-II drives in my gaming PC in raid 0. 2 300GB maxtor drives in my slackware box. If the harddrive is the problem it will be my first one that ever failed.. I started with PC's like 15 years ago when I was in middle school so I'm definately due. Sorry for the novel but I appreciate the replies and I will be sure to update the thread letting you know if it is the cd drive or not. If the CD drive doesn't fix it I will let you know when it is back in my posession(I leave it at my mom's house for her to use and when I visit)

-Cory
 
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SirKenin said:
Ummm. Duh? That's all I can say...

There is NO plastic in a hard drive. You know what that platter was made out of? A glass substrate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_platter

They're either made out of aluminum or glass.

Like I said, go take a course or something. Anything. Learn what you are talking about before you speak.
Click to expand...

Using fdisk /mbr at the recovery console? You don't room to speak there. I started off with MSDos many years ago after learning Basic. Congradulations! You made the ignore list. (or maybe ignorant list? he he)

SERprise said:
wow, lot of activity here. This particular pc is back home at my mom's house but I should have it back down here hopefully this weekend (this is stuff I have a feeling I wont be able to instruct her to do over the phone). If not this weekend definately the following weekend. files on it aren't a problem, nothing of any sort of importance is on it.

The drive was actually recently reformatted too, no more than 6 months ago, the pc wasn't booting right(can't remember what error it was... either stuck on verifying dmi or boot failure) so I reformatted it but it didn't fix it. It ended up just being the dvd drive went bad so I bought a new drive and all has been well since. it took me soo long to figure that out, I was wanting to just throw the pc away. I was thinking today since there was a bad cd drive before, maybe the power supply or motherboard is frying them?? I am going to call my mom tomorrow and have her first reset the bios to default and when that doesn't work(doubt it but gotta try it, easiest thing to do) I will then have her unplug the cd drive. I am hoping (to avoid a headache) the pc boots after unplugging the drive, that way I atleast know what the problem is. I'll go for a new power supply if that is the case because it would most likely be causing that wouldn't it? It is NTFS though, so it could have something to do with the hard drive, hopefully not a hardware issue. I'm not really brand specific with HD's, owned em all and good results with them all(IBM pending)That drive is a lot older than the 4 years it has been in "that" machine. I bought that thing back in 2001-2002 with an old Iwill board (what ever happened to them?? lol) and I don't remember, maybe a 1.4 TBird setup I had. That drive has lived a decent life so no complaints here. nowadays I have a Hitachi 7k100 drive in my notebook(yes I know that is IBM), 4 Hitachi sata-II drives in my gaming PC in raid 0. 2 300GB maxtor drives in my slackware box. If the harddrive is the problem it will be my first one that ever failed.. I started with PC's like 15 years ago when I was in middle school so I'm definately due. Sorry for the novel but I appreciate the replies and I will be sure to update the thread letting you know if it is the cd drive or not. If the CD drive doesn't fix it I will let you know when it is back in my posession(I leave it at my mom's house for her to use and when I visit)

-Cory
Click to expand...

You will have to excuse the rederic that someone else has been blurting out. One tool that will tell you right off if you have a bad drive is a Linux Live for cd distro. When you boot off of a Knoppix live cd and reach the desktop the one or more hard drives will appear as desktop icons. You double click on one to open a window to see if the directory tree along with files at the root of the drive are seen. If you see them and can open any folder you know the drive is still good to save stuff off and probably needs either a repair of lost partition information and master boot record or a reformat.

The repair install option in XP has done well here when things went.... where ever! That was seen recently when a hardware problem appeared on either the cpu from overheating a month earlier or a board fault. But that was on a far newer drive. When booting from the installation disk the installer will ask right off if you want XP to go on a drive detected. If you see the "1 - C:\Windows" option you know the drive is still working. The post tests unless the logo screen is active will readily list the drives onscreen there.

OOPS! :P I forgot again...:eek: ! GPart the Gnome Partition Editor is an effective tool to see if a drive is functional. Here's a little on that Linux tool.

Gpart is a tool which tries to guess the primary partition table of a PC-type hard disk in case the primary partition table in sector 0 is damaged, incorrect or deleted. The guessed table can be written to a file or device. Supported (guessable) filesystem or partition types:

  • DOS/Windows FAT (FAT 12/16/32)
  • Linux ext2
  • Linux swap partitions versions 0 and 1 (Linux >= v2.2.X)
  • OS/2 HPFS
  • Windows NT/2000 FS
  • *BSD disklabels
  • Solaris/x86 disklabels
  • Minix FS
  • Reiser FS
  • Linux LVM physical volume module (LVM by Heinz Mauelshagen)
  • SGI XFS on Linux
  • BeOS filesystem
  • QNX 4.x filesystem
http://www.stud.uni-hannover.de/user/76201/gpart/

To download the free utility, http://www.tucows.com/preview/8292

You download this and burn the iso image to cd with a program like BurnOn a freeware to boot with and it will fully detect the one or more working HDs. BurnOn can be found at http://www.burnworld.com/burnoncddvd/
 
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I have an Iwill board in one of my servers, if that makes you feel any better SERprise. :) It's kind of finicky though... I dunno. Not my first choice for a board.

I don't think your drive is bad. Just follow the steps I outlined for you and hopefully one of them will solve your problem without causing you too much difficulty. Unfortunately PC Eye has proven repeatedly that he doesn't know what he's talking about (but it certainly sounds like you do).

Just to prove that he doesn't know what he's talking about, involved in my reading were people who could see all the files when accessing it from another OS and the drive would appear to work fine. They would put the "bad" drive in as a slave. However, when they put the drive back in as a master, it wouldn't work. I can give you references if you need them. So you can pretty much disregard all his Linux advice.

I did a ton of reading for you to see if I could isolate the problem. There are tons of reports of this happening and nobody knowing why. There are a wide range of possible solutions and I tried to present them all to you. What it sounds like is that people are turning to the HDD manufacturers for help, the manufacturers are sending them to Microsoft, and Microsoft is sitting there shrugging their shoulders. Heh.
 
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SirKenin said:
I have an Iwill board in one of my servers, if that makes you feel any better SERprise. :) It's kind of finicky though... I dunno. Not my first choice for a board.

I don't think your drive is bad. Just follow the steps I outlined for you and hopefully one of them will solve your problem without causing you too much difficulty. Unfortunately PC Eye has proven repeatedly that he doesn't know what he's talking about (but it certainly sounds like you do).

Just to prove that he doesn't know what he's talking about, involved in my reading were people who could see all the files when accessing it from another OS and the drive would appear to work fine. They would put the "bad" drive in as a slave. However, when they put the drive back in as a master, it wouldn't work. I can give you references if you need them. So you can pretty much disregard all his Linux advice.

I did a ton of reading for you to see if I could isolate the problem. There are tons of reports of this happening and nobody knowing why. There are a wide range of possible solutions and I tried to present them all to you. What it sounds like is that people are turning to the HDD manufacturers for help, the manufacturers are sending them to Microsoft, and Microsoft is sitting there shrugging their shoulders. Heh.
Click to expand...

You can read? You still haven't figured out the difference between fdisk/mbr and fixmbr yet. :rolleyes:
 
PC eye said:
You can read? You still haven't figured out the difference between fdisk/mbr and fixmbr yet. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Microsoft's directions for using FDISK on NTFS:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=315261 :rolleyes:


Whatever happened to that ignore function by the way? You feel like getting another arse whoopin? Or did you take a crash course in computer electronics today so you don't bs your way through everything? You know.. like plastic harddrives disintegrating.. Stuff like that. :rolleyes:
 
SirKenin said:
Microsoft's directions for using FDISK on NTFS:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=315261 :rolleyes:


Whatever happened to that ignore function by the way? You feel like getting another arse whoopin? Or did you take a crash course in computer electronics today so you don't bs your way through everything? You know.. like plastic harddrives disintegrating.. Stuff like that. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

The one part you continue to ignor(ant)e is the part on "using" a "boot floppy" not booting from the XP installation disk to the recovery console opttion. :rolleyes:

"1.Boot to a command prompt by using a Microsoft Windows 95, Microsoft Windows 98, or Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition (Me) boot floppy disk." Get it now?
 
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