A Disk Read Error Occurred

[hikermann]

Accch!!

WIN XP Home Edition - put in a new 320GB hard drive a week or two ago; everything reloaded and worked fine. Two days ago, while a DVD was loading, things went wacko ... and Windows would no longer completely load.

Tried Repair, but that was useless; reloaded XP a couple of times, but it wouldn't get past the "Press any key to boot from CD" stage; finally attempted to clean the disk and reload XP last night -- now the Disk Read Error message shows up.

Only have access to

http://www via

my MacBook, so downloaded DBAN Boot n Nuke, as well as UBCD528 to burn onto disks; couldn't figure out, though, why the download/burn files showed differently: DBAN download = 15.5 MB but when dragged to burn the disk showed only 229 KB; UBCD download = 487 but when dragged to burn the disk showed only 98 KB. Neither would boot the PC.

What th' ... ?

What's the solution for the Disk Read Error Occurred?
How do I clean the drive and start-a-new?

Many thanks.

 

[rclarke250]

First off, you need to burn the disks as an image, not drag and drop. But, booting from the xp disk, you should be able to go through the install, just delete the partition, and create a new partition going through the prompts, if it doesn't see the partitions, then there is something wrong with the hdd, check cables, and reboot, is the drive in bios? use ubcd and hdd diags like dft, drive fitness tools on it to help diagnose issues with the hdd.