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Thread ID: 69572 2006-06-05 22:14:00 Drives wont boot andy (473) Press F1
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460828 2006-06-05 22:14:00 After putting pc into new box I cannot get it to boot. I get the message "A disk read error occurred - press ctrl alt del to reboot".

The system consists of:
ASUS K8N mobo.
Athlon 3000+ CPU
1 Gb dr400 ram
Pioneer 110 DVD-RW
Seagate 120Gb hdd
running on XP Pro

The system is set up so that I have two different versions of the operating system on separate removeable drives. These drives can also be run in an identical second system (on my pc, one system disk is for work stuff - never goes on line, the other is for playing. There is just one drive for my wife's pc, but any of the three drives worked in either pc).

The original problem was that (I presumed) the DVD drive kept crashing the system when reading disks. This was an intermittent but regular problem. I replaced the drive with a lite-on drive, which worked well for a couple of days, then just stopped reading commercial dvds - would write and read data fine.

I had the pc in a Cooler Master desktop case. This was a tight fit and was difficult to change bits in so I put it all in a tower case to make it easier to work on. I bought a brand new drive to set it up for testing.

I put it together and installed just Windows, SP2, nero and Power DVD - the software that came with the Lite-on drive. I did not connect to the Internet. Everything worked sweet. Both DVD drives worked fine for all tasks.

I then tried to boot from my "play" drive. No go. I got the above message. I tried my "work" drive - same thing. I reformatted one drive and tried to reload Windows - it got to the first install reboot and failed to boot. I have tried the other drive in the second pc and same result, so it looks as though the boot sectors have been destroyed - but why?

I am also concerned that Ghost cannot read a whole bunch of sectors on the new drive (the one that works!).

Has anyone got any ideas? Have I been attacked by some malicious virus? Is there anyway of recovering my drives? - they still seem to work fine for data, just wont boot. Moreover, how can I stop it from happening again?

I will be grateful for any suggestions. 		andy (473)
460829 2006-06-06 04:13:00 You've run trough quite a few steps. I've had a similar problem in the ancient past. When I move a hard drive from one PC to another, and get similar errors, my suspicion are as follows:

1) Conflicting drive on same cable.
2) Something in BIOS interferring with drive.
3) a very remote chance that the drive was somehow damaged in transit (unlikely)

You don't mention if your drive electronics, so I'm guessing you're using IDE drives. Obviously the first step is to hook the drive up to the cable directly, by itself, and bypass any removable drive cage.

Assuming this doesn't work, I'd hook up a DVD/CD drive on another cable, and using a bootable DVD/CD, check the partitions.

Do a google search on Hirens BootCD.

If no partitions show up, try it in another PC. It may be a BIOS problem in your new motherboard.

Hope this helps. 		kingdragonfly (309)
460830 2006-06-07 06:44:00 Thanks,
I'll try Hirens disk. I've tried the seagate utility - it says the drive is fine but windows still wont format it. Yes, they are all IDE drives. I've hooked them up directly, and it is still the original mobo on which tghey worked fine so I really am purplexd! Will let u know.
Cheers. 		andy (473)
460831 2006-06-10 05:43:00 Up and running! It seems to have been the drive caddy connections. I haven't inspected them closely but I connected each drive directly to the primary IDE port and each booted nicely, although they both demanded pretty near a full reinstall of Windows.
Many thanks. Seems strange that it suddenly happened to the two caddys that I had been using regularly and yet the new drive, also in a caddy in the same bay worked fine. I'll have a closer inspection when I rip it to pieces. 		andy (473)
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