Non-footie question - teccy one ...

Having some HD problems at home (getting ready to bin off this HD which has been nowt but unreliable in the year I've had it).

When I boot up, I am regularly getting the message: "A disk read error has occurred, press CTRL ALT DEL to restart" ... and that's it ... after a few re-starts I occasionally can scrape home via safe mode and run chkdsk etc ... all of which reveal no problems at all with the drive.

This is where it gets baffling ... when I change the boot sequence to the CD ROM with the intention of doing an XP repair straight from the CD ... I get the same error message, so I can't run anything from the CD ROM.

I'm hoping to back-up some essential stuff tomorrow in readiness for the impending total failure of the drive but I just can't understand:

1) Why there is a read error when the disk checks out okay and all data is in place seemingly untouched; and
2) Why it won't read the XP CD when the boot sequence is changed.

Any ideas anyone?

 

How many hard drives you got in the PC? More than one? Have you set the Jumpers correctly? Is it IDE or SATA wired?

Failing that, sounds like it's shafted!

 

Googling has revealed that one problem may be differing drive speeds.

I have a 133 as master to a 100. I'm going to try pulling the plug on the slave but it's odd that this should suddenly start up now without any warning and affect the CD ROM.

 

Could be bad news

And be the mother board the IDE connectors as opposed to HD. I would try first of all reinstalling the chipset drivers as these do the drivers for buses and ide etc to put it simply.

Then you have to look at the hard disk, ensure both your hard disks are on one cable and the cd rom on the other (Slave) and that one is set to master one to slave , and the CD to master.

Then download the diagnostic disk from the makers site and see how that goes.

Just please don't say you have a Deskstar ( fondly known as the Deathstar) otherwise all bets is off LOL

 

RE: Could be bad news

No, it's a Seagate Barracuda ...

I'm expecting the worse ... so long as I can back up some important stuff first, I'm preparing myself for the worst.

 

RE: Could be bad news

If you get stuck Daz, I have a 250Gb portable USB drive you can borrow, good for saving stuff onto.

 

Tha could have teld me that before I shelled out for a new 'un! - Cheers mate, about time I started backing stuff up anyway. Unlike you I don't fill my HD with porn so I only need about an 80gig USB drive and I've got one on order for delivery tomorrow. Bizarrely, I've booted up this time just to download the Seagate diagnostic tool and it's booted up without any errors whatsoever ... computers eh!