Hardware Analysis - Getting rid of "A Disk Read Error Occured. Press CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart" error.

Re: Getting rid of "A Disk Read Error Occured. Press CTRL ALT DEL to restart" error.(solved)

Phil Kay — 2009-10-27T06:46:40-05:00

Philkay said:

This occurs when an old computer is fitted with a hard drive larger than 137 GB - Unless the PC has LBA support for large hard drives, you may be aware that xp SP2 and above have LBA support but the motherboard also has to support it (it should be in the bios if it is supported). If LBA is not supported in the bios, when windows is installed and the disc formatted, windows will stop formatting at 137 GB although it tells you the drive is larger, the parts of the drive are not formatted. When the disk is filled with data and reaches 137 GB, windows continues to fill the disk but it will lose the boot sector and the message comes up.

In my case, all the data is good on the hard drive - if swapped to another PC as a slave drive.
As my pc does not support LBA had to rethink.
I have used a partition software to partition the large 250 gb drive into two parts, none larger than 137 GB, the first partition to carry windows but much smaller than the max allowed. I formatted with NTFS both partitions. When installing windows, I installed on first smaller partition and formatted that partition again with the windows disk during installation. I have copied the data back accross and will update if this is now successful.

Please note - do not re-format or partition the drive without making sure you back up the data first or use a fresh HDD, I had bought another one the first time the fault occurred, on refilling the new HDD the problem occurred, so I still had original HDD to copy from. WARNING re-partition and format will otherwise lose all data on the drive.

Hope this helps

Just to confirm that the hard drive was not broken/faulty in my case, it was a brand new hard drive which had been filled by my back up data and the fault could be re-created. After partitioning and reinstalling windows, my backup data has been copied accross and has been working now for weeks without problem.

This post will help someone who has the SAME problem as I did. Trying to fit a large capacity hard drive to an old pc/laptop

Re: Getting rid of "A Disk Read Error Occured. Press CTRL ALT DEL to restart" error.

Jay Walle — 2009-10-24T00:03:19-05:00

IF YOU SEE THIS IN EVENT VIEWER - "The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk0\D." - THIS MEANS YOU NEED TO REPLACE YOUR HARD DRIVE. THEY ARE SO MANY FAKE TECHIES. REMEMBER - KISS. KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID.

Re: Getting rid of "A Disk Read Error Occured. Press CTRL ALT DEL to restart" error.

Jay Walle — 2009-10-23T23:58:14-05:00

The reason for the error is obvious, your hard drive is shot. No other reason!. I have three hard drives, I got the same error. I disconnected the drive the drive that was bad and my PC booted up without any issues. If the problem was with the c drive then my pc would never have booted up. I was lucky it was the 'L' drive and not the one with the windows ntdlr.

Re: Getting rid of "A Disk Read Error Occured. Press CTRL ALT DEL to restart" error.

Phil Kay — 2009-10-06T14:20:09-05:00

I think I have a solution to this problem:

This occurs when an old computer is fitted with a hard drive larger than 137 GB - Unless the PC has LBA support for large hard drives, you may be aware that xp SP2 and above have LBA support but the motherboard also has to support it (it should be in the bios if it is supported). If LBA is not supported in the bios, when windows is installed and the disc formatted, windows will stop formatting at 137 GB although it tells you the drive is larger, the parts of the drive are not formatted. When the disk is filled with data and reaches 137 GB, windows continues to fill the disk but it will lose the boot sector and the message comes up.

In my case, all the data is good on the hard drive - if swapped to another PC as a slave drive.
As my pc does not support LBA had to rethink.
I have used a partition software to partition the large 250 gb drive into two parts, none larger than 137 GB, the first partition to carry windows but much smaller than the max allowed. I formatted with NTFS both partitions. When installing windows, I installed on first smaller partition and formatted that partition again with the windows disk during installation. I have copied the data back accross and will update if this is now successful.

Please note - do not re-format or partition the drive without making sure you back up the data first or use a fresh HDD, I had bought another one the first time the fault occurred, on refilling the new HDD the problem occurred, so I still had original HDD to copy from. WARNING re-partition and format will otherwise lose all data on the drive.

Hope this helps

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Re: Getting rid of "A Disk Read Error Occured. Press CTRL ALT DEL to restart" error.

jake maginn — 2009-08-31T04:34:01-05:00

hi ive just had this problem on a laptop running windows xp pro sp1
oh yeah my spellin sucks bear with me

the story: i had my laptop on and i got called away i left it on because i tougth i would be a few minutes. an hour later my laptop had presumeably gone in to stand by hiting the power
to bring it back on i recived an error sayin someting about windows than listed some optins i chose to start noramaly than i received the dam error A Disk Read Error Occured. Press CTRL ALT DEL to restart ever since than it wont get to windows it will not even let f8 work
ran ibms disk check on it says theres a error on the hard drive ive put the hard drive in a differt computer says the same error

the specs are
dell latitude c600 bios a23
base cd drive
10 gigabite ibm travel master
512 megs ram

this post has had updates for 4 years so this is a problem that many pepole have im guessing

thank for any help in advence

Re: Getting rid of "A Disk Read Error Occured. Press CTRL ALT DEL to restart" error.

MIKE GOGGINS — 2009-08-27T22:56:08-05:00

Simple Fix. Restore defaults in BIOS

Re: Getting rid of "A Disk Read Error Occured. Press CTRL ALT DEL to restart" error.

Ralph James — 2009-08-18T17:01:43-05:00

Well, the first thing is to save your data by copying it to another media (drive, DVD etc...) before attempting repair. You can do that by booting from a bootable CD that can read NTFS partitions or by removing the drive to place into a USB external enclosure or as a slave drive in another computer (if a desktop). You can use a CD to boot from like Bart PE or Linux System Rescue CD.

After saving your data you can use Linux Rescue CD in an attempt to recover/rebuild your boot sector or you can boot from a Windows CD with an attempt to repair you mbr from the recovery console.

Re: Getting rid of "A Disk Read Error Occured. Press CTRL ALT DEL to restart" error.

hala zaky — 2009-08-18T09:29:58-05:00

soul assassin said:

I've also got the same problem.
It all begain when I installed Mandrake 10, then I couldn't boot to Windows XP.
So, I deleted all the Unix partitions, and then I got this error. I've tried fixmbr (via XP repair), fdisk /mbr, installing it on a FAT32 partition (yet with other NTFS partitions in use), and nothing works. I really need to know what the problem is, I've got 180GB of arhive data that needs to be saved! Please, save me!

Re: Getting rid of "A Disk Read Error Occured. Press CTRL ALT DEL to restart" error.

Ralph James — 2009-08-06T18:55:57-05:00

Linux System Rescue CD - http://www.sysresccd.org/Download - Run TESTDISK

Bart PE - http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/
Bart PE Tutorial - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0reKK2ASEaU

Run Chkdsk /f

You at least need a bootable CD that can read and write NTFS and has chkdsk on it

PS: If you boot from the Recovery Console try a password of blank. You could also try your username and password since most users are by default admins.

Re: Getting rid of "A Disk Read Error Occured. Press CTRL ALT DEL to restart" error.

sandeep gupta — 2009-08-06T13:22:58-05:00

dear frn... thanx for all ur support but m not aware of the vocabulary u r telling BE....

Pls tell me as basics....

I have tried for booting by CD.. n enter r console for the recovery but it is asking password of administrator which i never even put..

its dvd rom fies have bad sector n so window is not reading it n error coming for the same..

now i tried even in safe mode to start bt it too failed..

waiting for reply..

sandp_gupta@yahoo.co.in

Re: Getting rid of "A Disk Read Error Occured. Press CTRL ALT DEL to restart" error.

Ralph James — 2009-08-06T12:16:36-05:00

You don't need Linux on your system to boot from a Linux CD???? You can boot from a Bart PE CD also to run chkdsk /f

Re: Getting rid of "A Disk Read Error Occured. Press CTRL ALT DEL to restart" error.

sandeep gupta — 2009-08-06T11:57:34-05:00

m not running linux in system.. i put my cd n trying to boot it, thinking that it will recover missing files from cd.. but not joy till now..

if it starts booting then what i need to do during booting... shd reconsole or run normally..

pls reply.. highly thanx to u

Re: Getting rid of "A Disk Read Error Occured. Press CTRL ALT DEL to restart" error.

sandeep gupta — 2009-08-06T11:57:33-05:00

Re: Getting rid of "A Disk Read Error Occured. Press CTRL ALT DEL to restart" error.

Ralph James — 2009-08-06T08:47:17-05:00

Did you boot from a CD to run Chkdsk /f to fix file system errors? Or boot Linux System Rescue CD to run TESTDISK to see if your drive has physical errors?

Re: Getting rid of "A Disk Read Error Occured. Press CTRL ALT DEL to restart" error.

sandeep gupta — 2009-08-06T08:31:36-05:00

no, its from starting... 250 GB HDD