PCTech Forums

Posted: **Tue Jan 23, 2007 9:43 am**

Hi, i was wondering i have this Maxtor 200gb HD and when i plug it up after the boot sequence i get this message

A Disk Read Error Occured
Press Ctrl+Alt+Delete to restart

So i was gonna try to reinstall windows xp on it and, i get to the screen
Press any key to boot from cd... which i press a key then the screen goes black. Is the hard drive done for, is there something i can do to get it to work again? Thanks

Posted: **Tue Jan 23, 2007 12:22 pm**

Posted: **Tue Jan 23, 2007 3:13 pm**

Posted: **Tue Jan 23, 2007 4:26 pm**

Posted: **Tue Jan 23, 2007 11:57 pm**

also...is it sata or ide?

Posted: **Tue Jan 23, 2007 11:59 pm**

This may or may not be of help. I remember I purchased a new hardrive for my win98 pc several years back. I plugged it in and booted up and I got a similar error. I figured out for some reason I needed to use the floppy that came with the disk to format the drive before I could use it.

About 2 years ago I bought a brand new 200gig seagate but I don't remember if I had to use an install floppy on that.

Hope this helps.

Maby just try and format with fdisk or something. Or make sure if it is the only drive make sure you set it as master or just stick in on cable select.

If you have two drives make sure they are not both set to master.

Posted: **Wed Jan 24, 2007 3:35 am**

Its a sata and yeah it used to be my main drive, then one day i was downloadin some music, everything was fine, shut it down as usual then the next morning i goto boot her up and i start getting this message. So i figured a virus doomed it. So is there any chance of bringin it back to life?
thanks

Posted: **Wed Jan 24, 2007 4:47 am**

Does it make any grinding noises or any noises at all? If it does that could mean the head crashed into the platter pretty much ruining the drive.

Posted: **Wed Jan 24, 2007 5:33 am**

There is a chance of bringing it back. You need to make a floppy boot disk and boot the system up using it. Then type in fdisk /mbr there is a space between the k in fdisk and the /. This rewrites the Master boot record from a stored location on the drive.

The system should see the drive and boot up. At this point, there could be an issue of the quality of the drive. In the BIOS, you might want to see if SMART HD testing is enabled. This would tell you on boot if the drive was bad or going into failure mode. A hard drive doesn't usually go bad all at once.

Hope this is of some help

Posted: **Wed Jan 24, 2007 1:10 pm**

Can i make it an iso and burn it to a cd? Dont have a floppy drive at the moment, my cpu didnt come with one.

Posted: **Wed Jan 24, 2007 5:26 pm**

You can have a copy of the win98 boot cd that I made, it does have fdisk on it.

Posted: **Wed Jan 24, 2007 11:38 pm**

Wow, good thing i didnt trash the HD, I downloaded this program http://www.killdisk.com/downloadfree.htm and wiped the drive clean, and now itll let me install windows, and its workin fine. Thanks for the help guys

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