"Disk Read Error"

DavidWright05

New Member
Hey, ANOTHER problem.

My main computer, is gonna need a new MoBo, which will take about 3-4 weeks to be finished with, so I bought a new cheap GFX card for my old PC so I could have something in the meantime. I figured 30 bucks was a decent price for a one month "rental"...

Anyway so I plug the new GFX card in, beautiful, I have signal... IT reads the hard drive as the master and I set the bios so that the hard drive is the first priority boot device... but then it says "Disk Read Error, press Ctrl-Alt-Del to restart"...

So i'm wondering... is that supposed to mean the HD is toast? It's strange because it reads it. and shows it on the diagnostics on startup... In addition to that I remember plugging it in as a slave onto my newer PC to offload data under a year ago
 
Last edited:

PC eye

banned
First make sure no floppy or cd is still in a drive and that the floppy search is disabled in the bios setup. With XP the fast way to see if the disk has seen a problem is to run the disk ceck utility once you get past the bios post tests.

When booting with the XP installation disk you choose the R for repair option to go to the recovery console and try the "Fixboot" and "Fixmbr" commands to see the boot information rewritten there. You can also type in the "chkdsk /f" command in order to run the check disk utility from there. The full list of commands with details for the recovery console is seen at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314058
 

DavidWright05

New Member
upon typing "chkdsk" (It doesnt recognize chkdsk /f or chkdsk/f)...

It says "it appears there is one or more unrecoverable problems" or something to that extent. Does that mean I wont be able to run windows on the drive and have it function normally?
 

DavidWright05

New Member
This question now becomes more relevant because the re-formatting process seems to be stuck on 7% for 30 minutes now... I dont ever recalling it taking THIS long.

HELP!
 

PC eye

banned
The idea of going to the recovery console was to attempt repairs on the boot information preventing Windows from loading. The "/r" is only the read only switch while the "/f" switch is the command to repair any errors found when using the check disk utitlity.

But the problem there may just be a failied drive since you are seeing a freeze up during the reformat. Sometimes a cable turns out to be the problem rather then the drive itself. If you are using the typical grey flat ribbon cable trying another one would have been one idea before trying to wipe the drive.
 

DavidWright05

New Member
I may have jumped the gun a bit... since it's moved to 9%... Just going a LOT slower than i'm used to.

Is there any downside to using the "QUICK" format option?
 

PC eye

banned
The only time I use the full format option is when wanting to see the drive cleaned without deleting the partition or using something like Active KillDisk. Generally the quick format for simply seeing a clean insttall of Windows is adequate and saves quite a bit of time.

Hopefully you are not wiping out a good number of files and data without having backed things up first. The idea was to find out if you could have saved the current installation. A repair install would have been tne preferred method over reformatting the drive if that was needed. That method preserves the current installation while replacing the main system files and creating new boot information.
 
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