"A Disk read Error Occured" Win Xp Home

The Muppet

A Friend of mine has a pc showing this error message just after post screen " A Disk Read Error Has Occured C/A/D to restart . I have tried chkdsk /r, fixboot and fixmbr from the recovery console. Have googled a bit on it and the message appears to be an undocument feature of NTFS with xp. Any suggestions to repair this short of a low level format and reinstall. He has data on the drive that he wants to keep.

RobertFoster

when that happened to me I bought a new HDD because I thought it was knackered...

KdjaCL

Format it and use easyrecovery to rescue what he needs, but after resucing doa full format drive becomes weird after easy recovery takes things off it.

kdjac

The Muppet

Originally posted by KdjaC
Format it and use easyrecovery to rescue what he needs, but after resucing doa full format drive becomes weird after easy recovery takes things off it.

kdjac

Thanks KDJAC. From what i,v read around the net The data on the drive should be accessable if I install it as a slave in another xp machine. I have not had the time to do that yet so i dont know if it true.


I was hoping to get the drive working again witout haveing to blank it and reinstall. but it appears thats not possible. Or is It?

I,ll leave it until tommorrow evening and see anyone can come up with anything , If not I go for the backup and reinstall.



Robertfoster the chances are your old drive is physically fine if you still have it, you can download utilities from your drive manufacturers web site to run diagnostics on it . AFAIK in most of these cases a low level format will sort the drive out and a reinstall on a FAT32 partition instead of NTFS will prevent the problem from reoccuring.

Thanks

KdjaCL

Have you tried the ulitiies for the drive? like IBms tool or wutever.

Maybe the IDE cable is crap and old or pin missing somewhere along the line ,been moved recently?
Try replace IDE cable see if that helps, as you have tried the MBR it kinds rules out boot related, but also could be a virus.
kdjac

The Muppet

Originally posted by KdjaC
Have you tried the ulitiies for the drive? like IBms tool or wutever.

Maybe the IDE cable is crap and old or pin missing somewhere along the line ,been moved recently?
Try replace IDE cable see if that helps, as you have tried the MBR it kinds rules out boot related, but also could be a virus.
kdjac

Have not done any tests on the drive but it sounds ok and from what I was told about the way this problem developed it I suspected a virus or something altering teh boot record but as you say the steps i took should have sorted that. I will go at it seriously tommorrow and test the drive. I can access the drive from a boot disk and all the data looks to be there

I did try another IDE cable but to no avail. There are quite a few articles on the error message on the net but very little on fixing it apart from what i have done already.
If I do get it sorted i will post here for future reference but at this stage a reinstall looks likely.


Thanks KDJAC

hostyle

Use a partition magic boot disk or something similar to resize the existing partition, and create a new partition in the free space. Then use a DOS or similar bootdisk to transfer data you want to back up to this new partition. Format the old parition, and install your OS. Then transfer your backed-up data from the second partition to the first. Then, optionally, use partition magic to remove the second partition and resize the original to full size.

The Muppet

Thanks HotStyle I hadn,t thought of that , Do you know if partition Magic 8 will do that on an xp machine.

Cheers

tom