disk read error... advice please

[Will1]

Hey CF

I was over at my friend's place and he booted up his computer only to get a error message reading "A Disk Read Error Occured. Press CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart".

He has a 3 month old HP desktop computer. We opened the computer up and took a look at the hard drive (to eliminate the most obvious). Everything appeared to be fine and we made sure that the cables were all secure. I am pretty sure he is using Fat32 file system.

As well we ran the HP diagnostic software which claimed that the HD failed the hardware test with an error message " HD521-2W ". So far no luck with the HP website to determine what the error code means exactly.

Any help/advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

 

[bullzi]

this is gonna sound dumb, but is there a floppy in the floppy drive?? lol theres a funny story to this... i was building an old computer for a friend that just needed internet, and after i installed windows i was loading drivers via floppy for chipset, etc. WELL when i rebooted the computer it said disc read error, it took me TWO days to figure out i still had a floppy in there. lol, just a thought to check...

 

[TRDCorolla1]

You may have a corrupt master boot record. Do a reformat and run an Fdisk /mbr to delete the master boot record. Backup what you have just in case.

It could also mean that your harddrive may have a bad sector. Try to find some low level formatting tool by going onto Western Digital's site. Maxtor has one called MaxBlast.

 

[Will1]

You may have a corrupt master boot record. Do a reformat and run an Fdisk /mbr to delete the master boot record. Backup what you have just in case.

It could also mean that your harddrive may have a bad sector. Try to find some low level formatting tool by going onto Western Digital's site. Maxtor has one called MaxBlast.

alrite, ill give that a try and thanks alot

lmao and yea i made sure there wasnt any cds or floppys in there, thanks anyways tho!

 

[bullzi]

lol k, sometimes i tend to overlook things when im in a hurry...

but yea do what ISOwner suggested, that sounds like that could fix/diagnose the problem further, hope it works


kyle

 

[dude_se]

this hapens to my old pc when theres a disc/floppy in or i have formatted and theres no os on there

 

[Raffaz]

You may have a corrupt master boot record. Do a reformat and run an Fdisk /mbr to delete the master boot record. Backup what you have just in case.

It could also mean that your harddrive may have a bad sector. Try to find some low level formatting tool by going onto Western Digital's site. Maxtor has one called MaxBlast.

Bit over the top aint it? He could try FIXBOOT FIXMBR and BOOTCFG /REBUILD commands before he goes as far as formatting the drive.

Also check that there are no floppies, CDs pendrives or external drives connected to USB etc.

And download a diagnostic tool from your HDD manufacturers website and run that.