Joe Emenaker

One of our faculty came in with his laptop which, when he tries to
boot it, just give him the message "
A disk read error occurred. Press ctrl+alt+del to restart" in white-on-
black letters in text mode. He said that he didn't do anything
memorable when powering down the last time before he had this problem.

I have a PC and a USB/IDE adaptor, so I can look at the laptop drive
on the PC. Here's what I've tried:

I first examined the drive on the PC and I could see all of the files.
I did a chkdsk, scandisk, and Norton Disk Doctor and everything was
fine. At this time, I backed up the entire drive to my PC.

I used a 2.5"-to-3.5" adaptor to put the drive into another PC and the
PC was able to start booting the drive (but didn't finish because so
much hardware was different). So, the hard drive seems to be good.

I put the hard drive from another laptop into the suspect laptop and
THAT started booting... so the *laptop* seems to be okay, too.

Then, I put it back into the laptop, booted a WinXP setup CD, went to
the Recovery Console, and ran FIXMBR and FIXBOOT. Problem persisted.

Then, I booted the WinXP setup CD again and tried a Repair of the
existing installation of Windows XP on the drive. Setup copied a bunch
of files to the drive and then rebooted to finish the install.... and,
again, I got "A disk read error occurred...".

Thinking that maybe there was something weird about the placement of
the partition, I used Partition Magic to move the beginning of the
partition away from the beginning of the drive a little ways. Problem
persisted.

Thinking that Windows' boot loader was being braindead, I moved the
partition even further away from the front of the drive so that I
could install a Linux partition before it and use the GRUB bootloader
to boot the Windows partition. GRUB booted the Linux partition fine
but, when I tried to boot the Windows partition, GRUB complained that
the partition was beyond the 1024-cylinder boundary... yet I was
certain that it began well *before* it.

So, I erased the whole drive and did clean install of Windows XP.
Setup copied the files, did a reboot to finish the install... and it
WORKED! So, now I know that *this* laptop, with *this* drive, with
*this* partition configuration, with brand new Windows files....
works.

So, I plugged the drive back into my PC and WITHOUT CHANGING THE
PARTITIONING, restored his original files back to the drive. Then, I
tried booting the drive in the laptop and, again, got the "disk read
error occurred".

What am I missing here?

Andrew E.

In recovery you should run:CHKDSK C: /R C: being the hd..Also,download
the hd disk checker utility from its mfg web site (only run the MS-DOS
version),
copy to MS-DOS formatted floppy,boot pc to floppy,run the tests.You might do
this before the recovery CHKDSK as that will attempt to fix the
problem(s)..Also,
think about replacing the hd.

"Joe Emenaker" wrote:

> One of our faculty came in with his laptop which, when he tries to
> boot it, just give him the message "
> A disk read error occurred. Press ctrl+alt+del to restart" in white-on-
> black letters in text mode. He said that he didn't do anything
> memorable when powering down the last time before he had this problem.
>
> I have a PC and a USB/IDE adaptor, so I can look at the laptop drive
> on the PC. Here's what I've tried:
>
> I first examined the drive on the PC and I could see all of the files.
> I did a chkdsk, scandisk, and Norton Disk Doctor and everything was
> fine. At this time, I backed up the entire drive to my PC.
>
> I used a 2.5"-to-3.5" adaptor to put the drive into another PC and the
> PC was able to start booting the drive (but didn't finish because so
> much hardware was different). So, the hard drive seems to be good.
>
> I put the hard drive from another laptop into the suspect laptop and
> THAT started booting... so the *laptop* seems to be okay, too.
>
> Then, I put it back into the laptop, booted a WinXP setup CD, went to
> the Recovery Console, and ran FIXMBR and FIXBOOT. Problem persisted.
>
> Then, I booted the WinXP setup CD again and tried a Repair of the
> existing installation of Windows XP on the drive. Setup copied a bunch
> of files to the drive and then rebooted to finish the install.... and,
> again, I got "A disk read error occurred...".
>
> Thinking that maybe there was something weird about the placement of
> the partition, I used Partition Magic to move the beginning of the
> partition away from the beginning of the drive a little ways. Problem
> persisted.
>
> Thinking that Windows' boot loader was being braindead, I moved the
> partition even further away from the front of the drive so that I
> could install a Linux partition before it and use the GRUB bootloader
> to boot the Windows partition. GRUB booted the Linux partition fine
> but, when I tried to boot the Windows partition, GRUB complained that
> the partition was beyond the 1024-cylinder boundary... yet I was
> certain that it began well *before* it.
>
> So, I erased the whole drive and did clean install of Windows XP.
> Setup copied the files, did a reboot to finish the install... and it
> WORKED! So, now I know that *this* laptop, with *this* drive, with
> *this* partition configuration, with brand new Windows files....
> works.
>
> So, I plugged the drive back into my PC and WITHOUT CHANGING THE
> PARTITIONING, restored his original files back to the drive. Then, I
> tried booting the drive in the laptop and, again, got the "disk read
> error occurred".
>
> What am I missing here?
>