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Corrupted hard drive?

N

NickN

Gawd
Joined
Jan 12, 2005
Messages
757
After having a TON of problems with my latest system upgrade, I finally got everything working... only to then boot up and have Windows not load.

The system POSTs, and it detects my hard drive just fine as a Western Digital 77,000-something megabyte hard drive. If I try to boot off ot it, however, it says

"Disk read error.
Press control-alt-delete to restart."

I tried booting of the Windows XP CD to reformat and reinstall Windows. When the installation gets to the part where it detects the hard drive, the computer reboots.

I don't have a spare hard drive I can test to see if the motherboard's IDE is just messed up, or what. Obviously it's not, because it can read the Windows CD and I've tried the hard drive on both IDE ports.

Any ideas? I think the hard drive is dead. :confused:

Edit: I checked, and the jumpers are set correctly. Still doesn't work. I've also tried with a different cable.
 
Bump.

One of my friends was good enough to tote over his computer and slave my hard drive into his. It works fine; we can access it and everything. We backed up all the data and formatted it, we're gonna see if it works in my computer after formatting.

This suggests that there's a problem with my motherboard. :eek:
 
The boot record's hosed on your drive. Even though you can read it on your friend's PC, that only means that the file system is relatively in tact. If the boot record has corruption or bad data in it, Setup will bomb. This is because XP setup does a quick probe of the boot record to determine what bootstrap and files are already in place so that it can either configure a dual boot, or prompt for a repair of the origional OS rather than a wipe and load.
Unfortunately wiping the drive during setup and/or reparititioning it WILL NOT correct the boot record but I have two easy steps for you on how to fix it.

1. If you have a DOS bootable CD or disk with fdisk on it, boot the system to that and type: fdisk /mbr to have fdisk reinitialize the master boot record.

2. Boot the XP CD up and instead of attempting to do an install, select repair and drop to a command line. Type in fixmbr(reinitialize the boot record) and hit enter, then run fixboot(fix the XP boot files if possible) and finally fixmbr(ensures the master boot record is reinitialized). If you can't even get to the point where you can press enter continue setup or r for repair, your only option is the first one I listed.


If you can't do the above, PM me and I'll send you a CD ISO (less than 1MB in size most likely) to burn and boot off of along with some simple instructions so that you can get it fixed.
 
I got this error, admittedly with SATA drives on an ICH5R setup. A BIOS update fixed it. See if there are any BIOS updates for your mobo, especially ones that address storage issues.
 
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