XP disk read error

[swhitten]

When computer turned on Friday, it says disk read error occured - ctrl-alt-delete to restart. Restart yields same message.

1. Ran Seagate hard drive utilities. All passed.
2. Ran Dell utilities. All passed. Did the very thorough ones, including the ones for the symptom "operating system won't load."
3. Now trying to boot from XP cd that came with my system (the Dell OEM cd). I have my bios options set to boot to from cd. I get message - press any key to boot from cd. I choose that. It says "setup is inspecting your configuration" then it goes to a black screen and hangs. So I can't boot from XP cd.
4. From everything I read, I think I'm to the point of formatting C, but I don't know to do that if I can't boot from XP cd.

I have all data off the drive (it read fine when I took it out and put it in a housing and treated as an external drive on another computer.)

How do I get to a place to format C if I can't boot?

Thanks!
Sherry

 

[firewolfrl]

sounds to me like you should check and see if you are having a hardware failure such as your ram. you said
" It says "setup is inspecting your configuration" then it goes to a black screen and hangs. So I can't boot from XP CD."
that is an indicator. unplug everything except the CD drive and see if it loads the XP CD. it it doesn't then try another CD drive...if that doesn't work I am betting you have a component failure.

post your results

 

[swhitten]

I took the hard drive out, and the XP cd loads fine.

 

[firewolfrl]

Ouch!
you may have a bad harddrive... if the harddrive is not letting the cd drive run then the issue may be a component failure in the drive itself.
can you get a different copy of xp to see if it is the bootdisk you are using?

 

[swhitten]

I found some instructions for making an XP boot disk from a working machine. I followed those and made one, but still no good. However I think my XP cd is fine. I took my hard drive out of my computer completely and booted off the XP cd, and it boots and goes thru initial part of setup just fine.

I took my drive out and put it in the external housing again and plugged it in (USB) to another working computer. I am now running chkdisk /r. It zipped thru steps 1-3 pretty quickly. It's on #4 now, and that has been running for over 12 hours and is at about 56% complete.

Prior to that, I booted from a Partition Magic cd, and it reported an error - partition improperly dismounted. When I started chkdsk on the other computer, it also reporeted that it could not get a lock on the drive and asked if I wanted to dismount all connections (not exact message).

So I'm wondering . . . I know with SQL Server, sometimes connections just get hung. Stopping/restarting the server is the only way. I am wondering if I had a similar situation?? I don't even know if that's possible.

I talked with Dell. One question the tech raised is whether my Latitude D600 can handle a 160 gb hard drive or if it's having issues because of that. That PC was purchased with the biggest drive they offered at the time - an 80 gb. I upgraded it to 160 back in Feb. That drive crashed in August, and I put another 160 in it. Now it has crashed. So I wonder if there's some merit to his question????

 

[Freestone]

In order for XP to handle drives larger than 137GB, two things are needed:

- BIOS support (did BIOS report the full 160GB size?)
- XP must be at least at Service Pack 1 level

See

http://www.48bitlba.com

for more information

 

[firewolfrl]

for the cost of computers in general these days, the cost of upgrading and the cost for the new drive plus the fact you are using the computer with a database. go to tigerdirect and buy a cheap refurbished fast new machine.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/category/category_slc.asp?Recs=30&Nav=|c:2631|&Sort=1

this is the one I like...I have bought six of these machines for my customers and every one of them worked great

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3322781&CatId=2631

I could not buy and build a machine for the cost of these machines. my component cost would be waaaay more than they are selling.


your computer is having issues and this is cheaper than to keep putting parts in an old machine