Boot problems

[tbalazs]

I am getting the following message during boot-up on a Win2K Pro machine:
"a disk read error occurred".
After many ctrl+alt+del the pc will then boot, apparently normally.
Does this sound like boot sector error, a possible virus, or a physical problem with the disk?
Thanks.
Tony.

 

[corbe]

yes, probably Bad Hard drive

 

[pbxman]

W2K should check your disk for errors - does it do that? And if so..does it pass the checkdisk?
Pbxman
Systems Administrator

Please let Tek-Tips members know their posts were helpful.

 

[goofygeef]

You possibly have a flaky boot sector, yes. Sounds simplistic but sometimes rewriting it can fix this problem up. You need to boot from a floppy (DOS 7 would be the one), make sure you have FDISK on there, and run it with the /MBR option, to force it to rewrite the boot sector. I have seen this fix a hit-or-miss boot problem many times.

 

[tbalazs]

goofyfeef - DOS fdisk/mbr even for Win2K?

 

[branhamc]

Have had the same problem before.... fdisk /mbr was the answer. Ususally this happened to me after a brief stint trying to dual boot with win9x of one or the other flavors... dont know if this info applies or not, just felt a need to get in my 2 cents worth

 

[goofygeef]

To tbalaz: boot sector is boot sector. The BIOS reads this to start up and run whichever OS is to be used. Even on a dual-boot machine, the boot sector info is simply swapped back and forth (there's a copy of each set in the root). If FDISK doesn't fix it I usually try one of my utilities to low-level reformat the sector (first trying to keep the existing data, then just making sure it's usable). Even if you end up having to wipe out that sector you can manually copy the info back from one of those sets of files.

 

[tbalazs]

goofygeef, fdisk /mbr seems to have done the trick! Thank you.

 

[goofygeef]

A few years ago, most people didn't even know that feature existed, MS kept it undocumented.