a disk read error occurred

HI notesetter. That temp does seem reasonable.

I'm assuming that you installed this hard drive and so you know about jumpering the hard drive for master or slave and how to plug it into the IDE cable and such.

My suggestion, at this point, is to remove this 250Gb drive from the computer and make it a slave drive on another working computer with Windows XP. Then boot Windows XP up on this other machine. Once it is booted click Start -> run -> type 'cmd' and press ENTER. At the command prompt, use the chkdsk command previously talked about like this: chkdsk x: /r where x: is the drive letter of the 250GB Seagate drive. Let the chkdsk finish. It will probably fix some file system problems and the drive. Pay attention to any critical errors such as unrecoverable problems, or bad clusters found. Once the chkdsk is done, shut the machine down, and put it back in the old machine. See if it boots properly now.

EDIT: If the Seagate drive can not be read properly on the other machine (i.e. It won't get assigned a drive letter) then you have some pretty significant corruption somewhere with the the partition table or file system. More advanced tools are necessary to recover this. If there is no data on the drive that you want or need I would suggest at this point repartitioning, reformatting and reinstalling the operating system on that drive. In order to prevent the windows install from stalling, delete the partitions and re-create a new one from the working computer using the disk management console before you install the drive back into the old machine. Disk management can be found by right clicking My computer, and selecting Manage. This ofcourse will erase all your data!

Okay. I had to actually install Windows XP on an old hard disk (hooked up as a master drive in the same computer) in order to run CHKDSK on the SeaGate Barracuda. The results returned 0 bytes in bad sectors. For all intents and purposes, this drive is passing all tests with flying colors. I could even browse around the drive from within the new XP install. But when I hook the drive back up to the master cable and try to boot it up, I still get the message: A DISK READ ERROR OCCURRED PRESS CTRL+ALT+DEL TO RESTART I'm having a hard time understanding this. The drive is functional, and all the data on the drive appears to be readable. Between the time it was bootable and I started to get the error message, I made literally no changes to the computer or its setup. I hibernated it on Tue. evening, and when I went to turn on the computer on Thur., I got the error message. Could this be a problem with the MBR? If so, what would be the likely cause?

Leave the drive as a slave and boot to the recovery console with the XP setup disc. You can use the fixboot and fixmbr commands on the slave drive still. I have never used these commands on a slave drive, so I'm only using a very educated guess at how you need to do it because I just looked the information up for you.

First, run the MAP command. (type MAP and press ENTER)
This command should list the physical device names of the hard drives on your computer. You want to make sure you are working on the right drive. You need to know the device name of the drive (i.e. \device\harddisk2) and the drive letter (i.e. D:)

Now, type:
fixmbr device name (i.e. fixmbr \device\harddisk2)
fixboot drive name: (i.e. fixboot D:)

Then, exit recovery console, power down the machine and hook the drive up as master again. See if you can boot now.

Because you can still read the drive, you can literally copy and paste the files from this drive to another drive then repartition and reformat the drive and then copy the files back to the drive. You have to make sure that you copy all hidden and system files and you might have problems with file permissions on the drive while trying to transfer files. However, it is possible.

Worst case scenario, you need to transfer the important data off the drive and just reinstall everything. (You can repartition and reformat the drive as a slave so that windows setup doesn't hang up on it)

NTLDR is missing Press any key to restart

Great!!! We are moving forward…

Now, with the drive hooked up as a slave, boot Windows XP on the working drive. Copy the ntldr, and ntdetect.com files from the working drive to the non-booting drive. They are located in the root (i.e. C:\)

On the non-working drive, see if there is also a boot.ini file present. There should be. If there isn't we will have to recreate one. But, let me know.

EDIT: You will have to show hidden files and folders to see these files.

How to show hidden and system files in Windows XP:

• Open My Computer, then click the Tools menu, then click Folder Options.
• In the Folder Options window, click the View tab.
• In the Advanced Settings window:
  
  • Select Show Hidden Files and Folders.
  • Uncheck Hide extensions for known file types.
  • Uncheck Hide protected operating system files.
• Click OK, and close the My Computer window.

The 250 GB SeaGate now shows up as a 10.1 GB volume under the fresh installation of XP on the spare hdd. It contained only a hidden folder "System Volume Information" and a hidden recycle bin icon named "Recycled"–no boot.ini file. I've copied NTDETECT.COM and ntldr from the good installation over to the troubled disk.

Uh oh…It should not be saying it is a 10Gb drive. First, was this copy of Windows XP that you installed fresh at least Service Pack 2? Don't do anything with the drive at the moment. Is there important information on this drive? It is important that you do not write anything else to this drive at the moment.

It was a slipstreamed SP 2 disk made from the original XP Home disk and the SP 2 updates. The system info window confirms that it's an installation of Windows XP SP2. It has some files that I'd like to have, but there is no critical information on it. I'd like to not have to go through re-installing all of the software that was on it, if it's possible to avoid that. More important to me is knowing why this occurred and how it may be prevented in the future. Learning the best way to fix it is, at this point, a great bonus.

Well, because you were using at least a service pack 2 version of Windows it means that there must've been a problem in the MBR like you said. Windows did attempt to repair it. (And, congratulations, you are the first time I ever have seen fixmbr destroy a partition) But, it fixed it incorrectly. So now you have a 10GB partition. Your problem was certainly caused by some type of disk structure problem. Its hard to say what caused it. Luckily, the drive is good and it has passed with flying colors like you said. I should've seen this coming. There are methods to recovering the partition and restoring the data. But, I'd have to do a lot of research to come up with something you could use on your end. I have special tools here that are not free that would make easy work of this. So, I just need to know if the data is really important, and if it is I can consult with some of my colleagues here at WTT and try to come up with a solution that is best for you. Otherwise, the easiest thing to do here is to just reinstall the operating system and software. After getting everything setup the way you want, it would be a great idea to create a set of recovery discs or image of your drive for backup purposes. Several programs are available to do this but I use a program called Acronis True Image which is not free, but is worth every penny it costs. I do apologize that I did not put more diligence into telling you to transfer the data off the drive while you had a chance and it was setup as a slave and accessible.

I have one more thought.. In your BIOS settings, does the BIOS recognize this drive as the full 250Gb drive?

Don't sweat it. If there was anything critical that wasn't already backed up, I would have transferred the data as soon as I could read the disk under the new install on the spare disk before I went fooling with the MBR. I know to do that. There's not really a need for me to recover any of it, as anything that was truly important had already been backed up. What I cared about most was preserving the installation of XP the way it was before I got the error message, and it's apparent to me now that that wasn't going to happen no matter what I did . Again, thanks for your efforts and for sharing your knowledge with me. Peace, David

The BIOS sees it as about 137.5 GB, probably because it's such an old BIOS. That's the way it was when I first installed the drive and it's the same now (after fixing the MBR) The BIOS has been updated to the latest version, but it's still too old to recognize the full capacity. Windows XP always listed the full capacity of the drive due to whatever workaround XP has for dealing with big drives on an old BIOS.

Yeah, its quite possible that your problem has occured because of the BIOS not reading the drive properly. I'm almost certain that the fixmbr command messed things up because of this. XP doesn't really have a "work around" for reading drives bigger than 130Gb if this BIOS is limiting it. If you want to save yourself a headache in the future, I would recommend not creating a partition on the 250GB hard drive that is bigger than 130GB or so. Although XP might see the whole drive, it is quite possible that once it tries to read or write beyond the 130GB portion things might really fall apart.

I've considered creating a \boot partition to address this issue. I originally wanted to set this drive up as dual-boot environment for XP and Ubuntu. Incidentally, at the time of the error message, I had only used about 20 GB of the entire disk, so I definitely didn't go past the 130 mark. But I also know that Windows likes to write all over the disk. Do you know of any reliable resources that pertain to creating a \boot partition? Is that even a solution for my situation? I put it on the shelf before because it seemed like too much trouble, but if it's going to save me problems like this in the future, I'd like to read up on it. Thanks again, Dave

I'm not entirely sure what you mean when you say a boot partition? If you are talking about creating multiple partitions, one main boot partition, and possibly a second data partition, then yes you can do that quite easily during the XP setup. Even doing this the BIOS will still not let more than 130GB of the drive be read (two paritions could not total more than 130Gb still). I'm real uncomfortable saying that it will even work reliably if you keep the parition smaller than 130Gb. Its really hard to say what will happen when the BIOS is not letting the O/S access the drive properly. I'd like to hear some other opinions on this because to be honest, I don't have any experience trying to force something like this to work. If the drive size is limited by the BIOS I have always installed and used a drive smaller than the maximum allowed to prevent any problems. It just makes sense to me that the results of using a drive larger than what the BIOS will handle will be uncertain.