So, I got the infamous error everyone seemed to be getting:
A disk read error occurred
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart
I'm not going to bore you, and tell you how I probably got here. But I
knew one thing: I didn't want to lose my data on my drive!
I've tried the following (and didn't work), but these are still
strongly recommended if you are having this problem:
- Reset your BIOS to Default Settings
- Put in an 2K/XP/2K3 CD and enter recovery mode and run the
following:
- FIXMBR
- FIXBOOT
- CHKDSK /R /P
Now, X hours of my weekend of free time, and still no luck. But I was
determined, and this was the answer to my problem...
BIOS! My Hard Drive was set to Auto Detect. I can however,set my hard
drive to different modes. It was on Auto, so I changed it to LBA. I
restarted my computer, and BAM! It continued to load passed the BIOS.
I restarted a few times (just to check) and I was rolling! So
hopefully, this will help about 1% of the people who have this
problem. Good luck to y'all!
Might want to change your CMOS battery.
That setting shouldn't have changed by itself...
One other thing to consider. Never run chkdsk on a volume unless there is a
full and complete backup. Chkdsk can cause data loss. The first step
should be to backup the data. If the drive won't boot there are several
options among which:
1. Install as a slave drive in another XP or Win2k computer and copy the
data
2. Boot with a Bart PE disk and copy the data to USB drive or flash drive
3. Download / create a bootable Knoppix Linux CD. Boot from that, and copy
the data to USB drive or flash drive, and if the computer as two CD drives
one of which is a burner you can use the k3b burning program on the Knoppix
CD to burn the data to CD.
--
Rock [MVP - User/Shell]
Yeah, knoppix is very impressive.
Within a few minutes you have a functioning PC with you LAN and everything
working without having to write anything to the HDD.
Thank you Thank you!! This worked like a charm on the HP D530 in my
office. I had used Norton Ghost to backup a drive that was failing,
and it would not boot from the new drive. I believe this is an issue
that HPs were susceptible to. This article https://
adelie.ucs.ed.ac.uk/dstwiki/index.php/BootProblems
has a good listing of ways to fix an XP machine that wont boot, and it
listed the LBA method as well.