A disk read error occurred. Please press CTRL-ALT-DEL to restart.

[WMFMS]

I partitioned my 40gb seagate harddrive into two 20gb NTFS partitions last September. I recently ran the SiSoft Sandra HDD benchmark on my D: drive, only to find that a standard ATA100 7200RPM 30gb should receive a score of about 24000. Mine was 3166.

I was deleting files from D: to free up some space, but it took ages and the system kept freezing. I decided to defrag the D: drive and see if it helped performance. I left it running this morning while I watched the England match and came back to find the system had rebooted itself. Just after it said "Verifying DMI Pool Data" as usual, I was given a message saying "A disk read error occurred. Please press CTRL-ALT-DEL to restart."

So I did. This happened about 3 times, but on the fourth time it accessed the WinXP boot menu as usual. But now the XP loading screen takes ages, and when the screen goes black (just before Windows loads the mouse cursor) I see a blue screen with an error message about the registry quickly flash (so quick I can barely read it) before it reboots again.

Is there any solution to this problem? I don't really mind reformatting the disk if that will solve it, but it would be good if I could access it one last time because I have about 5gb worth of .psd and work files that I'd like to backup with Nero if it was possible. If not, is there a way to access the disk by hooking it up to another PC? What should I do next? Thanks for your help. WMFMS

[Peter M]

Your HDD is dying. It's a bit late to say that, but the concept of data backup kind of suggests you copy your data to a safe place BEFORE bad things happen ...

[WMFMS]

Peter,

I managed to re-install XP and backup my files. How do I reformat the disk and remove the partitions? Will completely wiping the drive solve the performance problem?

[NDD]

I don't think re-format will solve the problem. It's physical, you need to replace your HD :(

[Kurylo]

Me with ND ;).

[G Ray88]

WMFMS, if you have information on your drive that you need to keep, although it is expensive contact www.ontrack.com and see if they can help, if your not able to get your HD to work. Good luck:)
P.S. I read the rest of your thread, where you were able to backup your files, the ontrack web site might come in handy latter.

[Peter M]

... and if you've learned your lesson, you'd better buy something from these guys:

www.onstreamdata.com

regards, Peter

[WMFMS]

Thanks for your help. I did manage to back everything up... (even though it wasn't really that important, just kind of sentimental if you see what I mean).

The drive still works, just extremely slowly. It's almost impossible for me to copy or delete any files, it either takes too long or just crashes. But I've noticed a conflict in Device Manager between the Primary IDE Controller and the SCSI device... Thing is, I can't change the IRQ's for either of them, or disable them, XP won't let me. My mobo's a Gigabyte 7DXR, don't know.. maybe I need to update to the latest version of the Promise drivers..


Thanks for your help and replies. WMFMS