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"Disk Read Error" When Booting

Baroque And RollBaroque And Roll Every spark of friendship and loveWill die without a homeRegistered User regular
edited May 2008 in Help / Advice Forum
So, I woke up this morning took a shower and yada yada yada. Turned on my monitor, browsed for a few minutes and noticed that everything was running incredibly slow. So I figured, "Oh, I'll just reboot and everything should run fine." I was wrong. As it's booting, I get a "Disk Read Error. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to Restart." So I changed the primary boot from my DVD drive to my HDD to see if that would change anything. Nope. Got nothing. I'm really not sure where to go from here. I've never come across anything like this before. I did a little searching and turned up a multitude of answers, and I'm really not sure what to do. If I need to reformat, is there any way for me to recover all of the data I'm losing?

H/A, I really need you guys to pull through for me. I've posted a couple topics here before and gotten lukewarm response. This time I'm desperate. A lot of the data on that drive is stuff like pictures, school documents, etc. that I haven't had the chance to back up because of a shot DVD drive and no funds to buy an external HDD.

tl;dr - I'm getting a "Disk Read Error", don't know what to do, really need help.

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SteamID: Baroque And Roll
Baroque And Roll on

Posts

  • MrDelishMrDelish Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    Computer specs?

    It may be that the poor HDD is just old. You can try and reboot a few times to see if it manages to get through, like I've had to with one of my older computers.

    MrDelish on
  • urahonkyurahonky Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    Disk Read Error shows up in the black and white screen, not the blue screen right? Try loading up your BIOS (Del key at the beginning or F2, or whatever) and hitting "Load Optimized Defaults". I've had that happen to a few machines before.

    urahonky on
  • bowenbowen How you doin'? Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    In my experience this error is an early warning sign to disaster (read: complete hard drive failure). Make sure you have ample backups of your files.

    bowen on
    not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
  • nuclearalchemistnuclearalchemist Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    Yeah, I had this happen to me a couple of months ago. My hard drive had crashed, and so I needed a new one. Luckily, it might not be the end of the world for you. Try what was listed above, but if that fails, you will probably have to take the disk to a specialist if you want to get any of the data off of it (mine wasn't recoverable).

    nuclearalchemist on
    ~Eigen-fleichen
  • RuckusRuckus Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    Sounds like your drive is dying, if not dead. I'd shutdown your computer, give it about 15-30 mins for the harddrive to cool down to the ambient temperature, then start it up again and see if you can get in to Windows.

    Then start backing up all your stuff.

    Ruckus on
  • subediisubedii Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    Does an Ubuntu Live CD come with CD burning software? That may be your best bet for saving your data if it does.

    subedii on
  • Baroque And RollBaroque And Roll Every spark of friendship and love Will die without a homeRegistered User regular
    edited May 2008
    So I've been tinkering for a few hours now. I tried running the drive as a slave on multiple different computers, but then those wouldn't even boot into Windows. I'm thinking about seeing if anyone has an enclosure and seeing if it'll be recognized as an external.

    I also read in a few places that it may be the a number of things from the BR to a bad boot sector. So, I'm gonna go about trying to recover the 120 some gigs of data on there. I have a completely separate partition with all of my CDs backed up on it, so that's not a major loss. I'm just worried about recovering my pictures and school documents.

    Thanks for the suggestions, duders. If anyone comes up with anything that might help me, send me a PM or reply here. I'll be checking back often when I can.

    Baroque And Roll on
    2dtr87s.png
    SteamID: Baroque And Roll
  • JNighthawkJNighthawk Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    Re-seat your hard-drive. My friend had his computer boot with this until he re-seated his drive.

    JNighthawk on
    Game programmer
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