[almightybob7]

Hello again,
My computer was working well up until yesterday, when I accidently knocked the plug for the surge protector out of the wall. The computer was running at the time, so it restarted. The POST was going alright, everything was being detected, until it tried to boot from the hard drive. It recognized that there was a boot image on the drive and everything, but it said,

"A disk read error has occurred
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart"

I tried restarting, but the same thing popped up. The drive was working fine up until this point, no errors or anything. I tried reseating the memory, and it still happened. The hard drive is a Maxtor 200 gig hard drive which was just purchased in June, so I kind of hope that it isn't shorted out or anything.

 

[almightybob7]

top

 

[kiwiguy]

The disk itself is probably fine, but most likely the file system is screwed, if it was doing a write operation at the power-out.

Try booting from your XP CD and doing a Repair installation?

At worst you may need to do a reinstall, after a reformat.

Times like this those regular backups are handy huh?

 

[almightybob7]

yeah, i'll try that.

i won't lose anything during a repair installation, wiil i?

 

[kiwiguy]

The problem is, you might already have lost *a lot*.

Hence my comment about regular backeps. Always treat data on a hard drive as VERY temporary, unless at least 2 verified copies are stored elsewhere.

 

[almightybob7]

ok, i'll keep that in mind.

i hope i haven't lost anything from my hard disk, because i have a lot of software saved on there and everything.

 

[almightybob7]

top.

 

[Rich-M]

Make sure you read this and do it this way...the only thing you will lose are any added XP Service Packs and Windows Updates you can do again.
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

 

[valis]

fwiw, I would try the repair console, getting to the command prompt, and running chkdsk /r first. Just to see if it works well enough to get into windows to do some serious diagnostics. Rather do that than rebuild first, but it sounds as if you are going to have to repair anyhow.

 

[almightybob7]

ok.

i have the ultimate boot cd 4 windows, so is there any way that i could use that to my advantage?

thanks

 

[Rich-M]

Not that I know of. That has nothing to do with it.

 

[almightybob7]

ok thanks.

i tried to do a repair install of xp, and it got through it, but when i had to restart it came up with the same "Disk read error" message.

i'm running chkdsk on it now